The election in which Mexico will renew 17 governorships, the Chamber of Deputies of the Congress of the Union, and thousands of positions in municipalities and local legislatures has formally begun. In many ways, it will be a tough test for the movement led by President Claudia Sheinbaum, and the same applies to opposition parties, electoral authorities, and even the press.
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I list 14 factors in the course of these elections; for now, the first in three decades without Andrés Manuel López Obrador around. Because control of Congress and hegemony in governorships are at stake, the ruling parties capture attention: the definition of their main candidates, the distribution of their tasks in the territory, and the role their governors assume, including Sheinbaum, will define the game.
Who rules Morena. In her first two years in government, President Sheinbaum struggled to establish authority in Morena. The former favorites have faded, and the Morena National Executive Committee has placed cadres aligned with her. It is increasingly evident that in the public square and conversation, her voice and image are the only points of reference. But it remains to be seen whether the candidates for governorships will be those she prefers, or if figures like Adán Augusto López will impose people with whom she will be forced to close her six-year term.
Wear and tear of Morena governments. The season of leaks has been open for a while. Governors like Marina del Pilar Ávila of Baja California, or Mara Lezama of Quintana Roo, have received their share of media blows. The exposure of the excesses of outgoing governors will not subside before the definition of the ruling candidates. Very powerful media noise, but to predict a translation into fewer votes for Obradorism is risky. Polls show that rejection of Morena is growing; will the opposition know how to capitalize on it?
Marriages for money. The Federation suffers the hangover from López Obrador’s electoral bubble in 2024. It has been two years of bread and water. There is only one thing worse for democracy than a government pouring public budget into campaigns in its favor: that the money for Mexico’s very expensive elections comes from criminal coffers. Does Morena want to win at any cost? Which state will be the new Sinaloa? More than one? The illegal funding of elections in Mexico does not rhyme with an administration struggling to make ends meet. A huge risk.
Operators against telegenic candidates. The struggle that could fracture Obradorism arises from implicit incentives in the rules. The poll as an artifice generates candidacies as full of fame as of smoke. Leaderships with more roots, people who accompanied Obradorism from times when “friends” who give away health caravans did not spring up like mushrooms in August, for example, could resist the crowning of opportunists… and take their people to another party. The scar operation in several states will be major surgery with risk of hemorrhage.
Trump appoints and removes candidates. The ruling party fell into its own trap. They designed a system of impunity that makes them extremely vulnerable. By renouncing judicial prosecution of their own people, they handed that power over to the most interventionist U.S. president in decades. Morena’s candidates, and not to mention those of the Green Party, know they are at the mercy of having their visas revoked or being sent to the little room (if they are lucky). Washington plays with them like a cat holding a mouse by the tail. That is how sovereign they are.
The morning press conference in war mode. Sheinbaum prefers an electoral trench to a fiscal reform. She chose to endure a bitter year of building collection capacities. She will defend from her conference the anomie of finances exhausted from squeezing the same people so much. Over and over against García Luna and Calderón; all against Fobaproa and the PRIAN gas price hikes. She will be chief propagandist. If her calculation is correct, the Pyrrhic victory will be her greatest prize.
Immoral victory of the Green Party and the resilience of the PT. The opportunistic PVEM will manage to keep San Luis Potosí, flagrantly defying the anti-nepotism canon intended by Sheinbaum. And they are eyeing Quintana Roo. They are the most successful organization of lack of scruples in Mexican politics. With their indispensable votes in the chambers, they disguise their permanent and profitable blackmail as presentable. At the other extreme, in a zen mode, the PT works its strongholds in what they do best: barely winning enough to reaffirm the clause of eternal life.
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The shadow of López Obrador. The former president’s new book will be released right at the peak of electoral heat. Our bestseller returns in print, and maybe in video? live? The president will lavish, as throughout two full years, the usual courtesies. And the comrades will fulfill the ritual of buying and gifting. A new brick for the retablo of Tabascan ex-votos that urgently needs novelty to revive the worn slogans of their rallies.
An (overly) protagonistic referee. The National Electoral Institute and the Tribunal alternate to align as the twelfth player of the ruling party. The problem is no longer the lack of impartiality of these referees, but their interference in the game. That provocation is the bait that some in the opposition seem unable not to bite. The Somos party, to start, invests too much capital in talking about the INE rather than the citizens’ woes. You win with goals, not by protesting against the referee, even if they trip you up.
Somos, a refreshment to the conversation? The new party has yet to accomplish the feat. It must achieve 3% of the June vote. With everything against them, we will see if soon, at least, they become a voice that transcends the eroded opposition slogans of “narco-government” and avoids being just another that rings the bells against authoritarianism. How to distinguish themselves between two heated poles? The former pink tide has the right to speak within the party debate. They earned it through hard work; hopefully, it was worth it.
Movimiento Ciudadano on three tracks. In Nuevo León, Jalisco, and Sonora, the orange party seeks to prove that the intermediate elections are to strengthen identity. That after Samuel García’s rushed administration, their chances of retaining the Nuevo León governorship are alive, and that Pablo Lemus has the wind at his back to show that Morena has reached its limit in the cradle of mariachi are the starting points for MC. Will Colosio Junior finally grow up? Besides a shiny surname, Sonora deserves someone truly determined.
A decentralized PRIAN. Promises are for the summer. After that, PRI and PAN members across the country work case by case on alliances. They were defined by Obradorists as the impossible union born from lost privileges. The respective leaderships of PRI and PAN in the hands of Alejandro Alito Moreno and Jorge Romero insisted on verbally distancing themselves from that label while their mutual lack of stature condemned them to the same bed. The success of coalitions locally depends more on less interference from the national level.
Giving way. Defending the vote is an idea that has begun to circulate as a common cause among opponents. We will see if it materializes as a line of action that could have a subtext that also hovers, even if very embryonically: unwritten agreements to interfere as little as possible in places where the zero-sum of anti-Obradorist options paves the way for them. Will they have the capacity to agree to give way?
Militant press. Martin Baron, former editor of the Boston Globe and later the now decimated Washington Post, once said that the press’s job was to cover Trump’s war, not to wage war on Trump. In Mexico, some media outlets, entire ones, and many journalists on their own, see themselves at war against Morena and the government; and, in a similar position, are other writers, cartoonists, and platforms: at war against everything that is not Morena. To understand the election, one will have to clean glasses and cell phones very often.
