Claudia Sheinbaum elected president of Mexico, will likely continue AMLO’s legacy
BY EDUARDO GARCIA AND ALFREDO CORCHADO
MEXICO CITY – Overcoming even the rosiest predictions, leftist Claudia Sheinbaum has swept into Mexico’s presidency in a landslide that likely will enable her to accelerate the nationalist-populist program of her patron, who hands over power in four months.
Sheinbaum, 61, took nearly 60 percent of votes in Sunday’s three-way race, double the support of her nearest opponent. The ruling Morena party, founded by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, will control two thirds of both chambers of the national congress and 24 of Mexico 32 governorships.
What Sheinbaum – and Lopez Obrador – do with that mandate will define Mexico’s economic policy – including treatment of private investment in key industries like energy. It will also determine how so-far lackluster efforts against the country’s militarized criminal gangs and treatment of the hundreds of thousands of global migrants transiting the country enroute to the U.S. border.
Texas and other U.S. border states have a lot riding on how Sheinbaum proceeds. Mexico last year overtook China as the main U.S. trading partner, with some $800 billion in goods crossing the border. That trade is expected to jump as manufacturing returns to North America amid growing U.S. China tensions.
“Texas is the destination, origin and transit point of two thirds of binational trade with Mexico,” said Tony Payan, Director of the US Mexico central at Rice University's Baker Institute. “The US Mexico relationship runs through Texas, and the Mexican community in Texas is enormous - Dallas Houston, San Antonio Austin, El Paso. We’re talking a very intense relationship.
Payan, who is also Professor of Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, added: “I hope the next administration really, really understands that Washington is not everything. That the state capitals, whether it's Sacramento, in California or Phoenix in Arizona, or Austin in Texas, are the places of power for Mexico City.”
Called the Fourth Transformation, or 4T, Morena’s economic and social program is aimed at improving the lot of Mexico’s poor and working class. Under Lopez Obrador, the minimum wage has doubled, labor unions have grown a bit more free and needed cash has been delivered to the aged and others of Mexico’s neediest.
The export-fueled economy has proved resilient – with Mexico's “super peso” gaining 23 percent against the U.S. dollar since 2018 and now considered the globe’s strongest currency. But some analysts say Lopez Obrador's anti-capital rhetoric has kept private investor’s money off the table.
“As supply chains move out of China, Mexico is one of the best-positioned countries in the world to take advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Globalization Myth, which argues that regional economies like North America’s will prove key in future years.
“The next government needs to double down on infrastructure, education, public safety, and clean energy,” O’Neil said, “to attract the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment up for grabs.”
The United States accounts for two thirds of Mexico's global trade, with economic ties reaching deep into the U.S. industrial heartland. With analysts citing the need for dramatic improvement in the electrical grid, highways and other public works, Sheinbaum in her victory speech sought to assure investors that she is open to working with them.
“We will respect entrepreneurial freedom and will honestly promote and facilitate both national and foreign private investment that fosters social well-being and regional development” Sheinbaum said. “Always ensuring respect for the environment”.
Energy investment, which was opened to Mexican and foreign provide investment a decade ago, only to be squelched under Lopez Obrador, will present a key test.
“The commitment to change course on the energy sector was clear with both candidates, yet the political baggage Sheinbaum carries will make it harder for her to move quickly,” said José Antonio Aguilar, a businessman who develops wind farms to generate renewable energy.
Sheinbaum's resounding victory over Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate of a coalition of three opposition parties, might also signify the return of a one-party rule that characterized Mexico’s political system for nearly all of the past century.
Gálvez’s conservative National Action Party ushered in national democracy in Mexico by winning presidential elections in 2000 and holding the office for 12 years. A member of Gálvez’s failed coalition, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled Mexico as a one-party state for most of the 20th Century.
But the National Action’s mediocre rule and the PRI’s disastrous return to the presidency in 2012, now undergird Morena’s hold on power.
Critics fear that Morena’s bolstered political majority enables Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador to weaken institutions painstakingly created in the 1990s to safeguard democracy and limit presidential power.
López Obrador sent Congress in early February a number of proposals to alter Mexico’s constitution. The proposals include limiting the power of the autonomous National Elections Institute, which oversees federal votes and direct election of judges, including members of the Supreme Court.
The proposals would also eliminate autonomous agencies regulating energy, telecommunications and other industries, over which Lopez Obrador has sought to limit private investment in favor of state control.
Morena lacked the votes to get the measure through the last Congress. But Sheinbaum ran her campaign in part on vows to make them reality. With the Morena coalition's strengthened majority, Congress reconvenes Sept. 1.
Sheinbaum’s 58 percent of the vote is five points greater than what Lopez Obrador won in a four-way race six years ago.
Gálvez’s showing Sunday was far less than that predicted by most opinion polls in recent weeks, including a nationwide survey commissioned by Puente News Collaborative, an El Paso-based non-profit organization that covers Mexico and the borderlands. Most respondents in the Puente poll also judge Sheinbaum most capable of dealing with the U.S. relationship. The poll suggests that 69 percent of Mexicans believe Joe Biden would prove better for Mexico, compared with just 11 percent saying that about Donald Trump.
“Claudia, Morena just swept,” said Francisco Olivarez, who sells newspapers on a corner here. “Not even close.”
While Sunday’s vote cements Lopez Obrador’s political legacy, some of his policies haven’t delivered promised results.
Violence remains rampant – with 30,000 murder annually on is watch – as the criminal gangs battle one another and security forces. Long financed by smuggling narcotics to U.S. users, the gangs increasingly rely on migrant smuggling, extortion and other rackets that have more impact on Mexican communities.
Lopez Obrador’s doubling down on support of the bankrupt national oil company Pemex, flies in the face of worldwide moves toward a decarbonized world. And his expensive bets on public works, including a new, underutilized Mexico City airport and a tourist train encircling the Yucatan Peninsula, seem like unprofitable vanity projects.
In claiming victory just before midnight Sunday, Sheinbaum sought to calm her critics.
“We envision a plural, diverse, and democratic Mexico,” she said. “We understand that dissent is part of democracy and although the majority of the people supported our project, our duty is and always will be to look after each and every Mexican without distinction”
Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Eduardo Garcia, who has 30 years of experience as a financial journalist, is a contributor for Puente News Collaborative.
Alfredo Corchado is executive editor and correspondent for Puente News Collaborative
This story was edited by Dudley Althaus
Angela Kocherga, news director at KTEP public radio, contributed to story. KTEP is part of the Puente News Collaborative
