The conservative Xóchitl Gálvez of the PAN wants to become the first female president in the history of Mexico. AMLO classified the appointment as a “farce”.
Xóchitl Gálvez
By Jorge Pailhé (Télam) The election of the conservative Xóchitl Gálvez by polls as the only opposition presidential candidate in Mexico for the June 2024 elections opened an unprecedented political scenario in the country. This is because the historic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will not have its own candidate for the first time in its 93year history and there are also many chances that the dispute between two women will be resolved.
The confirmation of the candidacy of Senator Gálvez, of indigenous origin and member of the National Action Party (PAN), announced by the President of the PRI himself, Alejandro Moreno, provoked numerous comments in the Mexican press. Because there was time until next Sunday to confirm the positive trend for the current candidate, at the expense of the aspirations of the PRI candidate, also Senator Beatriz Paredes.
Gálvez is a 60yearold engineer of indigenous descent and aims to become the first female president in Mexico’s history, something she shares with the capital’s former mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
The opposition alliance, which will try to wrest power from the National Renewal Movement (Morena), will be complemented by the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which was founded in 1989 as a split from the PRI and from which the current president Andrés Manuel López in turn separated. Obrador is expected to establish the ruling power today.
The president, popularly known by his initials AMLO, classified Gálvez’s appointment as a “farce” and made it official after the remaining candidates resigned in favor of Gálvez.
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“The best thing is always democracy and what we saw now was a comedy, a farce,” he said at his daily news conference.
“Make no mistake, it is always necessary to fight simulations,” he added, referring to the fact that Senator Paredes resigned yesterday, four days before the end of the consultation period.
The government is currently conducting its own poll system to determine its presidential candidacy, which will be announced next Wednesday, three days after the end of the relevant referendum.
Sheinbaum, Marcelo Ebrard, Adán Augusto López, Ricardo Monreal, Gerardo Fernández Noroña and Manuel Velasco Coello are the Morenistas’ preferred options, but only former Mexico City mayor and former chancellor Ebrard have a concrete chance of being nominated.
According to a recent poll by the newspaper Reforma, Sheinbaum would have 37% support, 11 percentage points more than Ebrard, an old traveling companion of AMLO.
The current president the public figure with the most public support in the country, despite the attrition that comes with five years in power and Ebrard initiated the party’s nomination process through the electoral system in 2012 to determine who would be the PRD candidate in the elections this year.
On that occasion, López Obrador won by a narrow margin and entered the elections, where he was defeated by the PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, who governed from 2012 to 2018.
Mexican political analyst and economist Fidel Carlos Flores told Télam that everything points to the election being decided between Sheinbaum and Gálvez, with the prediction of a victory for the official candidate.
In this sense, Flores agreed with another Reforma poll that, in an election today, 46% would vote for Sheinbaum and 31% for Gálvez, while 23% of respondents did not give an answer.
The analyst and director of the Interés Público portal, in consultation with this agency, concluded that the failure to present a PRI candidate is linked to the traditional Mexican political party “drowning in the pride that power transmits”.
“It is a consequence of the PRI distancing itself from popular causes; it has become disconnected from the needs of the people, with a president like Peña Nieto, who was an invention of (broadcaster) Televisa, a marketing product,” he added.
Peña Nieto has had an erratic mandate that has failed to reduce the high levels of violence that Mexico has suffered since 2006, when conservative Felipe Calderón introduced a policy of “frontal war on drug trafficking” that led to an unprecedented number of more More than 100,000 deaths and victims were affected by abuses by institutional forces and criminal gangs throughout his term in office (20062012).
During Peña Nieto’s administration, the infamous case of the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, occurred on September 27, 2014, which had global repercussions.
As for the reasons why Morena’s candidate would win the elections, Flores argued to Télam that AMLO’s management would have a fundamental influence in addition to the virtues of Sheinbaum or Ebrard.
“López Obrador has delivered 70% of what he promised in his election campaign, he has implemented comprehensive policies that are recognized in the socioeconomic field. He is a man who has already entered Mexican history,” he concluded.