Authors: Lizbeth Diaz and Sarah Kinosian
MEXICO CITY – After a long wait, Mexican voters cast their ballots on Sunday in a historic election in which ruling party candidate Claudia Shinebaum of the left is expected to become the country’s first female president.
Sheinbaum leads the polls over her main rival Xochitl Galvez, who represents the opposition alliance made up of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the right-wing PAN and the left-wing PRD party.
A win for either woman would represent an important step for Mexico, a country known for its macho culture. The winner will begin a six-year term on October 1 and will face daunting challenges including tackling organized crime violence.
On her way to vote Sunday morning, Sheinbaum told reporters it was a “historic day” and that she felt relaxed and content.
“Everyone has to go out and vote,” physicist and former Mexico City mayor Sheinbaum said on local television.
Galvez, a businesswoman and senator, arrived at the polling station shortly after voting began to chat with supporters.
“God is with me,” Galvez said, adding that she expected to have a rough day.
Scheinbaum’s mentor, outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, greeted supporters and posed for photos as he and his wife walked out of the presidential palace to vote.
Voters lined up outside polling stations even before polls opened at 8am local time (1400 GMT), and there were reports of delays in the opening of polling stations.
“This is like a dream to me. I never thought that one day I would vote for a woman,” said Edelmira Montiel, 87, Mexico’s youngest Scheinbaum supporters in Tlaxcala.
“Before we could even vote, when you could vote, it was to vote for who your husband told you to vote. Thank God, everything changed and I can live,” Montiel added.
The campaign was marred by violence and 38 candidates were murdered, including a local candidate who was shot dead on Saturday night. It’s the deadliest death toll in Mexico’s recent history, raising concerns that warring drug cartels pose a threat to democracy.
Nearly 100 million Mexicans are eligible to vote in Sunday’s election. Other positions up for grabs include the mayor of Mexico City, eight governorships and both chambers of Congress. Approximately 20,000 elective positions are voted on by ballot, the most in Mexican history.
Voting will close at 6pm local time (0000 GMT on Monday). The first official preliminary results are expected later Sunday.
“Rivers of blood”
Rosa Maria Baltazar, 69, an upper-middle-class voter in Mexico City’s Del Valle neighborhood, said: “This country is full of blood because of so much corruption. “I hope my country can change its government and make life better.”
López Obrador loomed over the campaign trail, trying to turn the vote into a referendum on his political agenda. Sheinbaum rejected opposition claims that she would become Lopez Obrador’s “puppet” even though she has pledged to continue many of his policies, including those that help Mexico’s poorest people.
Polls suggest Morena may not win a two-thirds majority in Congress. That would make it harder for Sheinbaum to push for constitutional reform over opposition parties, including the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The PRI ruled Mexico for about seventy years until democratic elections in 2000.
Challenges for the next president also include addressing power and water shortages and attracting manufacturers to relocate as part of the nearshoring trend, in which companies move supply chains closer to their main markets. The election winner will also have to consider what to do with Pemex, the state-owned oil giant that has suffered two decades of declining production and is mired in debt.
Both candidates have promised to expand welfare programs, even though Mexico is running a huge deficit this year and the central bank expects GDP growth to be slow at 1.5% next year.
As the fentanyl epidemic rages in the United States, the new president will face tense negotiations with the United States on the large number of immigrants crossing the border from Mexico to the United States and security cooperation in combating drug trafficking.
Mexican officials expect those negotiations to be more difficult if Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidency in November. Trump, the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, has vowed to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico and said he would mobilize special forces to fight drug cartels.
Sam Castillo, a 25-year-old dancer who lives between Oaxaca and Mexico City, said he hopes Scheinbaum will be better at foreign relations than Lopez Obrador (Lopez Obrador) is tougher.
As he waited to cast his vote at a polling station in the Florida district south of Mexico City, he said he felt better now that leftist Morena was in power as part of the LGBT community.
“The gender legislation that we’re seeing, marriage equality, to me it’s all about political party,” Castillo said.
