WHERE I LIVE

Mexican elections will take place three weeks from today. A permanent resident, I can’t vote but will be watching the results with keen interest.

The Mexican state I live in is traditionally conservative. The war of independence from Spain was ignited here by a Catholic cleric, the priest Miguel Hidalgo. Then in the 1980’s the conservative, pro-Catholic PAN party supplanted the long-running PRI. Since then, the state has been a PAN stronghold, the only one in Mexico that the present liberal president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, failed to win.

Though outspokenly anti--abortion and inclined towards church orthodoxies, contradictions abound in the state. In the town where I live - home to a university of over 30,000 students, a symphony orchestra, and Latin America’s leading arts festival - queer couples hold hands in public, creative expression is unconstrained, and liberal thought flourishes. 

When the leftist AMLO ran for president six years ago, the talk among the fearful middle class was that he would turn Mexico into “another Venezuela.” Hardly. Today, the peso is strong, exports are at record levels, international investment is at an all-time high. The minimum wage has doubled, poverty has been measurably reduced. Rampant government corruption has been reigned in. Remittances from Mexican workers abroad are at record levels. Mexico has supplanted China as the US’s top trading partner. AMLO, a few weeks from the end of his six-year term, bears a 60% approval rating and would probably carry our state were he to run again, which by law he can’t. 

His critics, and he has many, claim he has failed to rein in crime and the drug cartels,  including in my state, perennially one of the most violent. AMLO has often been high-handed and dismissive concerning press freedoms. He and his party, Morena, have been accused of running roughshod over sacrosanct constitutional guarantees, undermining checks and balances. An AMLO pet project, the construction of a train through the Mayan jungles, has outraged environmentalists. The National Guard has taken over domestic security, alarming those who have too many memories of authoritarian abuse. 

His chosen successor, leading in polls and expected  to win on June 2nd, is Claudia Sheinbaum. Until recently she was the mayor of Mexico City, as AMLO once was. A scientist by profession, she received her Ph.D. in energy engineering at UNAM, Mexico’s leading university, and completed the work for her thesis at the Lawrence Berkeley National Library in California. Author of over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development, she contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.

Sheinbaum has openly identified herself as a feminist. She advocates for the legalization of abortion. During her leadership in Mexico City, she championed LGBT rights, and in 2022 became the first Mexico City mayor to attend the city's Pride march. In 2019 she announced a new six-year environmental plan that includes reducing air pollution by 30%, planting 15 million trees, banning single-use plastics and promoting recycling, building a new waste separation plant, providing water service to every home, and constructing and installing solar water heaters and solar panels. The same year, she announced a 40 billion peso (US$2 billion) investment to modernize the Mexico City Metro over the next five years, the construction of 200 kilometers of bicycle paths, and subsidies for public transportation.

Her main opposition is Xóchitl Gálvez, a woman senator with indigenous roots, often described as a tech entrepreneur. She represents a coalition of opposition parties that has some middle class support, but Gálvez is far behind in the polls. She tries to paint AMLO and his Morena party as ineffective on issues like crime and health care, and Claudia Sheinbaum as a Mexico City elite out of touch with the public.

A Mexican-Jewish female progressive academic in a staunchly Catholic, traditionally macho country? A nervy choice? It would seem AMLO is popular enough to get away with it. So far Claudia has stayed within AMLO’s policy orbit. But as Mexico heads into the largest election in its history, the drama is less whether she will win than what she will do when she steps out of AMLO’s shadow. 

Meanwhile, where I live, the cycles of seasons, ceremonies, rites and customs obey a calendar embedded in a history running much deeper than this year’s secular political election. Still, all eyes will be on the polls on June 2nd.