Voters choosing Mexico’s next president are deciding Sunday between a former academic who promises to further the current leader’s populist policies and an ex-senator and tech entrepreneur who pledges to up the fight against deadly drug cartels.
In an election likely to give Mexico its first woman president, nearly 100 million people are registered to vote in the race to replace outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Voters will also elect governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, and choose candidates for both houses of Congress, thousands of mayorships and other local posts.
The elections are widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress.
Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.
Morena hopes to gain the two-thirds majority in Congress required to amend the constitution to eliminate oversight agencies that it says are unwieldy and wasteful.
The opposition, running in a loose coalition, argues that would endanger Mexico’s democratic institutions.
Both major presidential candidates are women, and either would be Mexico’s first female president.
A third candidate from a smaller party, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, trails far behind.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is running with the Morena party.
Sheinbaum, who leads in the race, has promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.
Opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, whose father was Indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms.
A candidate running with a coalition of major opposition parties, she left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets” policy.
She has pledged to more aggressively go after criminals.
The persistent cartel violence, along with Mexico’s middling economic performance, are the main issues on voters’ minds.
It takes place against a backdrop of violence and deepening criminal control of swaths of the country.
Mexico has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America and hundreds
of organised crime groups, ranging from the small and local up to those with international presence and the kind of firepower typically
reserved for Armies.
This year’s elections have been the most violent in Mexican history, with more than 30 candidates murdered and hundreds more dropping out as criminal groups vie to install friendly leaders.
On Wednesday, the final day of the campaign, a hired killer filmed himself shooting the opposition mayoral candidate Jos Alfredo Cabrera in the town of Coyuca de Benítez, Guerrero, before being shot dead by bodyguards.
“There is much violence – perhaps not in Mexico City, but in the rest of the country,” said Vanessa Romero, a political analyst.
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