CETRI
While the outcome of Mexico’s presidential election on 2 June came as little surprise, the scale of it was startling. Claudia Sheinbaum, the former governor of Mexico City, had been the frontrunner even before she was formally named the candidate of a coalition between the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, Morena), the Green Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, pvem) and the Worker’s Party (Partido del Trabajo, pt). But while most polls in the lead-up to the vote projected her winning by a solid margin, there was little hint of the landslide to come. Sheinbaum scored 60 per cent, garnering just under 36 million votes, while her nearest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of a three-party coalition between the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, pan), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, pri), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, prd), scored 27 per cent ; Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the Citizens’ Movement (Movimiento Ciudadano, mc) came a distant third with 10 per cent.
Sheinbaum’s victory is even more impressive when broken down geographically and sociologically. Mexico is a tremendously diverse country, with marked demographic, socio-economic and cultural differences between regions. Since the advent of competitive elections in the 1990s, these have tended to produce a variegated political map. But Sheinbaum not only won all of Mexico’s 32 states except one (tiny Aguascalientes) ; she did so by more than 20 per cent in 25 cases, and by more than 40 per cent in 14. She performed especially well in the country’s poorer south, pulling in more than 70 per cent of the vote in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Tabasco and Quintana Roo. But she also won Guanajuato and Jalisco, the heartland of Mexican conservatism, as well as Mexico State, long a crucial base for the pri, and Nuevo León, bastion of the country’s northern business elites. Exit polls suggest Sheinbaum’s support also had a striking sociological breadth : she seems to have won a clear majority in every age cohort and of almost every level of education, and had a crushing 50-point lead among those who identified as ‘lower class’. Even among the ‘middle class’, whom the opposition had clearly expected to rally to its side, Sheinbaum was ahead by 30 points.
