President López Obrador’s party faces a major electoral challenge in 2024: Mexico City, where the left has ruled for 25 years and where Morena collapsed in the 2021 midterm elections. It’s not just any place. Even if the Cherry Party wins the presidency, it will be a major challenge to govern the capital in solidarity with the right. This is one of the reasons why the figure of former Security Minister Omar García Harfuch has strongly promoted the contest in 2024, especially in the polls on other names more related to the president’s transformation project, his possible appeal to the wealthier classes. Harfuch has to compete in the party’s internal polls with the mayor of Iztapalapa, Clara Brugada, who has been linked to Morena since its inception; Completes the shortlist with political significance and, to everyone’s surprise, a well-known character, the epidemiologist Hugo López-Gatell, who led the fight against the pandemic. The quartet is completed by Mariana Boy Tamborell, head of the Office for Environmental and Territorial Planning (PAOT), who already ran for the same position for the Greens in 2018.
Since the game is still very open, the policeman, the economist and the doctor will probably be the names that Morena will hear the most in the upcoming poll, while the echo of the previous one that made Claudia the winner is not yet present . Sheinbaum, who during his six-year term held the position for which his fellow believers are now running. If the flag has not yet been waved, the push is already noticeable between Harfuch and Brugada, certainly the only ones who have a real chance, as was previously the case with Sheinbaum and the former Chancellor Ebrard.
Brugada (Mexico City, 60 years old) is a racial politician, has a degree in economics from UNAM and has been involved in social struggle ever since. She touts her Morena origins and the achievements of her government at the helm of the mayor’s office of Iztapalapa, the most populous and poorest city, the breadbasket of the capital’s votes, with 1.4 million voters, of which she retained 57% of the vote for Morena. Support in 2021. At his rallies you can already hear a slogan that hits Harfuch right in the face: “More utopia and less police.” The utopias are the 12 cultural, leisure and sports complexes that he inaugurated, the undeniable trademark of his mandate.
Harfuch (Cuernavaca, 41 years old) has already put on his Morena-colored vest and in the last hours has defended himself with this sentence: “There are also left-wing men among the police, more than the people who are in the discourse.” But perhaps it is not just the votes of the left that the ruling party with Harfuch is looking for on the election poster. And it will not be the ideology that the police have to defend the most in these rough times before the election campaign, but rather a flaw in it File that doesn’t come out even with the best soap opera: his presence at the meetings where the call took place “historical truth”, that is, the handful of lies with which the events of the 43 normal students who disappeared in Guerrero nine years ago, was blurred.
With a degree in law, the policeman represents “the pragmatic dimension of Morena, a party that had the desire to create political cadres and strengthen institutions and now thinks more about winning elections.” This is the only way historian Humberto Beck can from the Colmex Center for International Studies understand Harfuch’s presence as a candidate. He is at the top of citizens’ preferences when the desire to run did not even occur to him. At the beginning of last year, his name already sounded strong, buoyed by popularity due to the spectacular attack on him, in which 400 bullets were fired at his car, which bore the signature of the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel. And for the citizens’ sense of security in the capital. “This is the most tangible achievement, and security is ideological or cross-class,” Beck continues. The more right-leaning population will appreciate this achievement and perhaps care less about whether or not and to what extent she was involved in the Ayotzinapa case. “The authorities didn’t care when they appointed him security minister,” says Beck.
But it’s not just security that matters to the people of the capital. At the local level, public transport for every city is a battle to win elections or maintain power. In Iztapalapa, the ordinary shifts fly to work: the rope bus inaugurated this semester is one of the achievements of the mayor’s office and the head of government, and Brugada is already demanding one for new districts if he comes to power. “Brugada has political and social networks and a third of the population under his control. It is deeply Morenoist and left-wing, but Morena has decided that the candidates will now be selected through public polls.” This is the big change that Héctor Tejera Gaona, anthropologist at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), mentions. And the city’s population prefers Harfuch for now. Political gossip refers to López Obrador’s sympathies for Brugada, as he likes people with ideology, as he often mentions. However, he has recently given some affection to the former security minister and this Thursday he even openly defended him against those who link him to Ayotzinapa. Attending a meeting does not mean one is guilty, the president argued.
However, Tejera Gaona believes that this process will be more controlled by Morena than the previous poll that decided the presidential candidate, where the candidates negotiated which polling stations and how they would conduct and monitor these questionnaires. Traditionally, it was the networks that the parties built neighborhood by neighborhood that influenced citizen voting, but “an open survey will also take into account what the middle class also says, for example, and there you have a man who ensures crime stability.” CDMX,” explains Tejera Gaona, although he is not so sure of the security successes associated with Harfuch, who, as he says, for now he only hears “repeating that he will continue Sheinbaum’s policies, but will not talk about a government project.” “In a poll open to the entire city, the meaning of the policies carried out in Iztapalapa can be distorted.” “And if the party supports him even in the Ayotzinapa case…”
Brugada has already mentioned the key words: middle class. And even his image is now less casual and more formal. The pirate captain of the Utopia ship, with his colorful turban in his hair, is unlikely to be liked by those his boss would call Fifis. The Iztapalap native is convinced that the right has reached its peak in 2021, but just in case she announces that she wants a “middle class” city “where the population escapes poverty and has more income and public resources services”. Harfuch has youth and beauty, not insignificant factors in a choice; Brugada harnesses the appeal of being a woman, which also gives her voices for a stronger feminist movement than ever before.
And Gatell
If the candidate best known to the public won the polls, Hugo López-Gatell would have no opponent, neither in the capital nor in the rest of the country. The astonishment that his revelation caused the head of government also extends to large parts of the republic. The renowned epidemiologist led the fight against the pandemic daily from the televisions in every household. During these terrible months it was said that he was as well-known as the president, and that is not surprising. Like him, everyone who held the same position in any country became famous. His popularity grew like a rock star, if not on the then deserted streets, then on social networks, where his fans loved him. But the froth died down as the extent of the Covid tragedy in Mexico became known and the political role he played played a trick on him. The epidemiologist, a great communicator, was irrefutable; The politician left a lot to be desired. Some believe that López-Gatell’s rise in the internal Moreno race came from the National Palace. “Gatell is the symbol of the most recalcitrant ideological dimension of Morena, of those who refuse to recognize the catastrophe of the pandemic in Mexico. The fact that his candidacy is planned is representative of the reality constructed by the party, the ideological fiction that Mexico was successful in the pandemic,” begins analyst Beck. “It was López Obrador who somehow exposed it and mentioned it, and the fact that he is among the candidates suggests that the president has not completely given up the baton,” he says. Gatell’s relationship with Claudia Sheinbaum has been strained during the pandemic. To a certain extent, the city followed its own measures, which were sometimes far removed from Gatell’s slogans. The symbol was the face mask: the epidemiologist refused to wear it, Sheinbaum never took it off.
Beck believes that Gatell preferred the political to the scientific and that this took its toll. The fact is that the doctor apparently wants to continue on the political path, but for now all questions are still unanswered. What role does it play in this competition? Will it divide the voices and thus favor Harfuch? Are you looking for one of those consolation prizes offered to those who don’t win the election, perhaps a senatorial position? Or maybe he just trusts his chances of winning and wants to give it a try. “Gatell is a proposal from López Obrador,” says anthropologist Tejera Gaena. What this means and where this move could lead is still a mystery.
The race for Mexico City is more interesting than previous polls. Previously, the horizon was clearer, everyone predicted that Sheinbaum would win in his field, and it is known that Morena has a good chance of winning the presidency in 2024. Who will win now in the ruling party is not yet known, and even less is known whether whoever wins will be able to twist the results that the city has shown in 2021 in his favor, that big fiasco for the left in the midterm elections. The Broad Front coalition for Mexico regained its enthusiasm under the banner of Xóchitl Gálvez, but at the same time dropped out of the capital’s race for the presidency, a woman who seemed like the winner. Nothing has been decided yet for the 2024 elections in the heart of Mexico.
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