Winner takes all
Claudia Sheinbaum makes history
Welcome to a Sunday post-election analysis edition of The Mexpatriate.
You can look at a painting, or a photograph—a moment frozen in time—from so many angles. You can magnify one detail and conjure a meaning from it, and yet be completely bewildered by its place in the bigger picture. Or you can stand back, making out just an impression of the scene, and miss the one fragment that changes everything. You can look and look, but still struggle to see.
Today, I’m sharing some initial takeaways and numbers I’m pondering as I try to take in both the big picture and the details of the new political panorama in Mexico.
Last Sunday, nearly 170,000 polling stations were installed across this wildly diverse country; citizens tallied millions of paper ballots; people of different ages, backgrounds and identities stood together for hours waiting to cast their votes for different visions of the future.
And the results in favor of Claudia Sheinbaum and the 4T (“cuarta transformación”) movement were even more of a landslide than expected.
They were “contundente,” which is one of my favorite words in Spanish. “Overwhelming,” “decisive,” just don’t have quite the same percussive, emphatic rhythm needed to capture this election.
Mexico’s first woman president has a mandate
A number of international headlines about Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory included admonitions—not only about Mexico’s economy and security problems, but the magnitude of the triumph itself, immediately framing it in terms of excess power. The WSJ said Sheinbaum’s job is to “save the nation,” the Los Angeles Times called her win “historic but foreboding” and according to The Economist, “a danger for Mexico.”
While the new President-elect undoubtedly faces challenges on multiple fronts, this should not diminish her win in electoral terms: the final count announced Friday shows she won with 59.76%, or 35.9 million votes—surpassing AMLO in 2018 by over 5 million votes and 6.5 points. She won the most votes of any presidential candidate in Mexico’s history, in absolute terms.
The first woman to govern the country will take office with strong popular support.
In her victory speech, Sheinbaum said “I do not arrive alone, but with all of us [women]...our heroines who gave us our homeland, our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and granddaughters.”
I wrote about Sheinbaum this week in a profile for Mexico News Daily if you’re curious about her background and political ascent:
Who is Claudia Sheinbaum? A profile on Mexico’s first woman president
Morena has (almost all) the power to implement broad policy changes
Markets have reacted negatively to the election results, with the peso weakening about 8% to 18.41 against the US dollar (its weakest position since last spring), and the BMV (Mexican Stock Exchange) falling steeply on Monday, then recovering midweek before another slump on Friday.
Why were markets spooked when Sheinbaum’s win had been widely anticipated? The answer lies partly in the magnitude of her win, and also in the rest of the election results.
The final numbers are still pending, but right now it appears that the Morena-PT-PVEM coalition won a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house of Congress, exceeding their strong legislative position in 2018, which had declined after the midterm elections in 2021. In the Senate, the Morena coalition looks set to be merely two seats short of a supermajority. Morena also held on to its bastion in Mexico City with Clara Brugada, and won six of the eight state gubernatorial races.
This sweeping of a win came as a surprise, which markets never like. I would qualify the “surprise” though, because polling did indicate the ruling party alliance was going to do well in most of the races, including in Congress. Also, if you look back at the congressional results in 2012 and 2018, they broadly reflected the presidential contest. In 2012, the PRI coalition won approximately 39% relative majority in Congress (their candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency with 38.21% of the vote), while in 2018, Morena’s coalition won about 49% majority in Congress, and AMLO won 53% of the vote.
In policy terms, this means when the newly elected lawmakers take office in September, Morena could pass legislation (including Constitutional reforms) with little negotiation required, making AMLO’s package of reforms announced earlier this year increasingly likely to become law.
Sheinbaum has said previously she supports the president’s reforms, but told reporters on Thursday that “it’s still not defined,” adding that she supports opening up a public forum in Congress: “my position is that we need to open a dialogue…a process needs to be opened for getting to know the reform.” Earlier in the week, she endorsed a set of economic commitments from Treasury Secretary Rogelio Ramírez de la O (who will be staying on in his position) to reduce anxieties in the markets.
AMLO, however, has been unequivocal: he will prioritize the approval of the judicial reform before his term ends on Sept. 30.
“Now what are they afraid of? That the people choose judges, magistrates and justices? El que nada debe, nada teme (he who has nothing to hide, has nothing to fear),” he said at his Friday morning press conference.
In addition to the judicial reform—which everyone seems to agree is necessary, just not the way Morena is proposing—the reform package includes 17 other amendments across a wide spectrum of areas, from reducing the number of federal legislators, eliminating some autonomous government bodies and guaranteeing minimum wage increases, to banning fracking, concessions for open-pit mining and vapes.
It’s worth noting that Mexico’s Constitution is one of the most-reformed constitutions in the world, with 256 reforms approved since 1917. You may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, considering the outcry in reaction to AMLO’s reforms, but his term has not made the most tweaks to the Constitution to date—that distinction belongs to his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI.
While the legislation may glide through a Morena-dominated Congress, it will likely face friction in the courts. Two of the reforms that previously passed in Congress during AMLO’s term (the electricity reform and placing the National Guard under military control) have since been ruled unconstitutional by the SCJN, and so were parts of his “Plan B” electoral reform legislation.
Of course, winning supermajorities in Congress was exactly what Morena and its coalition set out to achieve. AMLO has been talking about the “Plan C” for over a year—garnering sufficient votes to give the Morena coalition the power to enact more of the 4T’s platform. This was not a sneak attack, but a frequently repeated call to voters, which they responded to on June 2.
In a democracy that has executive term limits, this mandate from voters not only for Sheinbaum as the Morena candidate, but for the party more broadly, can be interpreted as a vote for a “second term” for López Obrador and his movement. It has also made Morena a nearly hegemonic force in Mexican politics.
Despite the bloody campaign season, Election Day was mostly peaceful
The 2023-24 campaign period will likely go on record as the most violent in modern Mexican history, with 560 victims of political violence registered from September 2023 through May 1, according to data from consulting firm Integralia.
Days before Mexicans turned out to vote, a mayoral candidate in Guerrero was gunned down at his closing campaign event, becoming the 35th candidate or pre-candidate to be killed since September, the vast majority of them running for municipal positions.
However, despite the apprehension about what could happen on Election Day, there were relatively few incidents of violence or intimidation, considering the size of the election—around 20,000 positions up for grabs. Voter participation nationally was near 61%, which is slightly lower than in 2018 (63%) but doesn’t point towards mass intimidation.
I saw three different—busy—polling stations in San Miguel de Allende last Sunday. Despite being in one of the country’s most violent states, as I watched the lines of people patiently waiting to vote, I did not feel the fear that the numbers tell.
The opposition needs a reckoning
The story of this election is not just about Morena’s triumph, but also the failures of the opposition (at least, one part of it).
Xóchitl Gálvez, representing the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition, won 27.45% of the vote according to the final tally, or 16.5 million votes. In 2018, the PAN and PRI parties fielded separate candidates, and between the two of them, got 38.67% of the vote (the PRD did not have a presidential candidate in 2018). In other words, the math didn’t work out well for this uncomfortable trifecta.
Since 2018, these three parties have lost 25 governors’ races. This year, the race for Mexico City was thought to be tight enough that maybe the opposition could seize this jewel in the crown of the Mexican left—but Clara Brugada (Morena) won with 51% of the vote, 13 points ahead of PAN-PRI-PRD opponent Santiago Taboada.
While Gálvez conceded to Sheinbaum on Sunday night, she and leaders of the opposition PAN, PRI and PRD parties have since said they will file challenges and have made allegations of fraud. They have demanded recounts, which the INE is already doing in 67% of polling stations as part of its standard procedures (77% were recounted in 2018). Sheinbaum has encouraged the recount, as has AMLO, who also advised the opposition leaders to “take a deep breath” and do some self-reflection.
Aside from blaming the president, Morena and even the INE, some opposition thought leaders seem ready to spread bitterness and blame on the population as well, despairing that so many could vote for “the death” of Mexican democracy. However, most pundits, and former INE president Lorenzo Córdova and councilor Ciro Murayama, do think it’s wrongheaded to call the election fraudulent.
Journalist Denise Maerker came to the defense of Mexican voters, accused of irrationality and apathy in not defending institutions like the Supreme Court, saying in the weekly round table program Tercer Grado:
“In order to generate loyalty to certain institutions, those institutions have to have given you tangible results…You voted for someone who changed your quality of life [AMLO/Morena], and then they ask you to defend an [abstract] system that has not brought you any type of benefit. I can’t believe there is surprise on the other side, wondering ‘how did you not vote in defense of the Supreme Court?’”
I think there’s also a false consensus effect at work—among a certain group of educated Mexicans, being anti-AMLO is almost a given, and existential concerns about the state of Mexico’s democracy are pervasive. Many members of the media fall into this group and are therefore grasping for answers behind the bewildering results, perhaps forgetting that for many Mexicans, the existential concerns of poverty are far more immediate.
And there’s another interesting data point to consider: while Sheinbaum did extremely well among poorer voters, she also did well in the higher-income groups as shown in this chart below:
And what about the third horse in the race, the other opposition?
Jorge Álvarez Máynez of Movimiento Ciudadano did better than polls anticipated, winning 10.32% of the vote. Could MC become a new focal point for the anti-Morena opposition?
While Máynez performed well at the federal level (gaining 2.5 million more votes for MC than in the 2021 midterms), the party had mixed results in state elections and in Congress. What they can take away from this election is that their decision to not form alliances with the old guard parties appeared to be a sound one, giving them credibility in future elections as a legitimate—and growing—opposition force.
I will be writing more about the election and its aftermath in the coming weeks, and will also send out a news round-up edition to cover other news as well!
Thank you for reading, and if you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a subscriber.
I am excited about the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, and her potential for advancing our beloved Mexico. As an engineer myself, I am glad she is an engineer, and not just any engineer at that. She has a doctorate in energy engineering plus post-doctoral studies at Stanford in energy efficiency. Among world leaders she seems the best equipped to deal wisely with climate change.
George Blake