Sheinbaum sweeps to victory as Morena secures thumping majority
Thank you for reading LatinNews' chosen article from the Latin American Weekly Report - 6 June 2024
Claudia Sheinbaum will become Mexico’s first-ever female head of state after winning the presidential election by a landslide on 2 June. Sheinbaum’s triumph comes as little surprise, but the scale of her victory and the strength of the mandate bestowed on her and the ruling left-wing Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena) was eye-catching, surpassing that of her mentor President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Morena, with the help of its allies, looks poised to obtain the much-coveted two-thirds majority in the lower chamber of congress and at least a supermajority in the senate, allowing the government to pass constitutional reforms without opposition backing. If the elections were a referendum on the tenure of López Obrador, as some have framed them, he has passed with flying colours.
Sheinbaum obtained 59% of the vote, ahead of Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate for the main opposition coalition Fuerza y Corazón por México on 28% and Jorge álvarez Máynez of the small leftist opposition party Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) on 10%, according to preliminary results released by the national electoral institute (INE). This is as much as six percentage points more than López Obrador managed in 2018, suggesting that while Sheinbaum benefitted enormously from his endorsement her more restrained and moderate discourse widened her appeal, adding more centrist voters. Indeed, with 33m votes, Sheinbaum will be the president to have received the most votes in Mexico’s history.
Sheinbaum won in all but one of Mexico’s 32 states, with Gálvez pipping her to the post in Aguascalientes by some 20,000 votes. Sheinbaum surpassed 60% of the vote in as many as 18 states with Tabasco – López Obrador’s home state – giving her 80% of the vote.
While electoral surveys all pointed to a comfortable victory for Sheinbaum they did not predict Morena’s performance in the congressional elections. Preliminary results show Morena and its two allies, the Maoist Partido del Trabajo (PT) and the non-ideological Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM), as having between 346 and 380 seats in the 500-member lower chamber, which even in the worst-case scenario exceeds the 333 needed for a two-thirds majority.
The senate vote is a bit tighter, with preliminary results showing Morena and its allies winning between 76 and 88 seats, meaning that they could fall short of the 85 required to meet the two-thirds threshold. Given that the ruling alliance would only be a few seats short, however, it is probable that it would be able to strike a deal with sufficient opposition legislators to ensure the safe passage of constitutional reforms in any case.
These results, in addition to projected victories in six of the eight gubernatorial elections and success in the contest for the head of government in Mexico City (CDMX), spell a resounding success for Morena and, by extension, López Obrador. The president formed the party after his defeat in the 2012 presidential elections and it has gone from strength to strength, replicating the ‘carro completo’ of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the hegemonic party that dominated Mexican politics for 70 years (literally ‘complete car’, a phrase used to describe the PRI’s sweeping victories in the past at all levels of elections).
From gaining its first five state governorships in 2018, Morena now governs in 24 states, including two in allied hands. It also looks set to control 22 of the 32 state legislatures.
State governorships by party after gubernatorial elections
Composition of congress (preliminary results)
Reactions
Sheinbaum has been inundated with phone calls and messages from heads of state from across the region and further afield. Those to have spoken with the president-elect include US President Joe Biden, Canada’s President Justin Trudeau, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Honduras’ Xiomara Castro. Sheinbaum has also welcomed messages from the region’s leftist authoritarians: Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Cuba’s Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Sheinbaum’s responses to the congratulations extended to her on social media were never less than diplomatic but they varied in tone, by turns effusive and constrained. There was an “embrace” for Bolivia’s former president Evo Morales (2006-2019) and warm words for Petro and Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, for instance, while Maduro received “many thanks” for his comments, with the potentially pointed comment, especially in view of Venezuela’s upcoming presidential elections, that “it was a great democratic and participatory day for our people”.
Sheinbaum also reposted congratulations from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to whom she replied that Mexico would “always work to achieve a just and lasting peace in Ukraine” and from the Russian foreign ministry to which she responded that “without doubt dialogue and a search for opportunities for cooperation will be constant for our countries”.
The one message of congratulations Sheinbaum has not reposted with an accompanying response was from Ecuador’s foreign ministry on 5 June. It is not clear how that bilateral diplomatic impasse will be overcome. López Obrador is adamant that nothing short of returning Ecuador’s former vice president Jorge Glas to Mexico’s embassy in Quito, from where he was extracted by security forces in April, will suffice for Mexico to restore relations but Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has ruled this out [WR-24-20 ].
Investors wary
Not all responses to Sheinbaum’s victory have been positive. After a period of sustained strength against the US dollar, Mexico’s peso dropped following the election results, sinking to M$17.70/US$1 on 3 June, a decline of some 4.3% and its weakest rate since November 2023. This fall has been primarily attributed to market concerns over Morena’s dominance in the federal congress, which surpassed expectations. The fear is that this will enable the government to pass legislation that increases state interference in the economy and diminishes checks and balances on its own power.
These concerns are not without cause. Some of López Obrador’s less market-friendly proposals, such as his electricity sector reform, have been frustrated by his failure to muster a two-thirds majority in congress. Other proposed reforms have raised concerns over the erosion of democratic institutions.
The president presented a platter of constitutional reforms in February in the hope that June’s elections would produce the required two-thirds majority. These reforms include plans to reduce the size of congress and eliminate proportional representation; permit judges, magistrates, and supreme court (SCJN) justices to be elected by the public; eliminate autonomous institutions; and elevate the state-run electricity company (CFE) to constitutional rank.
Her own woman?
These concerns bring up the biggest unknown about a Sheinbaum presidency: how much she will be under López Obrador’s thumb. A loyal ally, she has so far backed all the president’s proposals. However, she is not cut from the same caudillista cloth as López Obrador and is markedly more pragmatic. Sheinbaum has made some promises that appear to differ from his policies, such as moving towards more renewable energy generation, but she is likely to tread carefully on this, while keeping López Obrador and his support base onside with a gesture, such as renaming the Petróleos de México (Pemex) Dos Bocas oil refinery in Tabasco after him.
Sheinbaum has proposed scaling up social welfare programmes and security strategies that she implemented while CDMX mayor, an indication that she intends to put her personal stamp on the presidency. But overall it is likely that she will feel indebted to López Obrador – his popularity and backing played a significant part in bringing her to power after all.
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The main difference between Sheinbaum and López Obrador is likely to be one of tone rather than substance. Sheinbaum is highly unlikely to break with López Obrador in the way that Ecuador’s former president Lenín Moreno (2017-2021), for instance, sought to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor Rafael Correa (2007-2017).
Sheinbaum will also be well aware that López Obrador controls the levers of power within Morena and the party’s base is loyal to him first and foremost. She will face a presidential recall vote halfway through her term. Introduced by López Obrador, this referendum should work as an insurance policy for him; if Sheinbaum were to turn her back on his key projects and policies, it would allow him to urge his followers to recall her.
Opposition pummelled
The elections constituted a massive setback for Mexico’s traditional opposition parties, the centrist PRI, the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), and the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), which together make up the Fuerza y Corazón por México coalition. Not only did their chosen presidential candidate fail to provide any real competition for Sheinbaum but the PAN and the PRI also look set to lose between 34-50 and 30-41 seats in the lower chamber respectively. These would mark steep declines in influence for both parties, while the PRD could potentially be left without any seats whatsoever.
The three parties also failed to make any gains at a state level. While the PAN clung on to its bastion of Guanajuato, where Libia García Mu?oz Ledo beat her Morena-PT-PVEM rival Alma Alcaraz by 52%-39%, it lost the gubernatorial elections in the south-eastern state of Yucatán to Morena by 51%-43% and the coalition failed to flip any states currently governed by Morena. The PAN’s former stronghold of Puebla was won by Alejandro Armenta Mier of Morena-PT-PVEM by a decisive 58%-34%. Morena’s Clara Brugada Molina, meanwhile, won the key CDMX contest against her PAN-PRI-PRD rival Santiago Taboada Cortina by 52%-39%.
The three opposition parties have announced they will present legal challenges to the elections, claiming that López Obrador intervened to unfairly influence the results. They have also called on the INE to conduct a recount in 80% of the polling stations. “We denounce that it was neither a clean nor a legitimate contest, the playing field was never level,” said the PAN’s national leader Marko Cortés, who has indicated that he will step down from his role, although without specifying a date.
Alejandro Moreno, the controversial national leader of the PRI, has said he will not resign until his term comes to an end in October. The PRI is becoming accustomed to chastening defeats, but this marked a new nadir. The party is likely to be the fourth or fifth largest in congress when the count is completed. Notably, the PVEM, which was previously just a small allied appendage of the hegemonic PRI, could end up with nearly twice as many seats in congress as the party from September.
The PVEM possesses a chameleon-like ability to transmute itself according to what party is in power, forging alliances at various points with all of them. It is motivated purely by power rather than ideological (or, for that matter, ‘green’) considerations. In 2000 it helped secure the presidency for Vicente Fox (2000-2006) in alliance with the PAN to end the PRI’s long hegemony before flipping back to the PRI under Enrique Pe?a Nieto (2012-2018) and then Morena under López Obrador.
MC success
The elections were more of a success for the MC, with álvarez Máynez performing better than expected, particularly among young voters, and the party itself gaining more votes than in previous elections. Preliminary results also show the MC as holding onto its governorship of the western state of Jalisco, with Pablo Lemus Navarro edging the Morena-PT-PVEM candidate Claudia Delgadillo González by 41%-38%.
The MC will look to build on this success to try and become a major opposition force in the years to come. It also expanded its presence in both the lower chamber of congress and the senate, winning between 23 and 32 seats in the former and four to eight seats in the latter.
Migration management
President López Obrador held a phone call with US President Joe Biden on 4 June in which the presidents pledged to continue their “close collaboration” on managing migration flows. The phone call took place on the same day as Biden signed a controversial executive order (EO) effectively denying migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally the right to claim asylum, with very few exceptions. The asylum ban will only be lifted once US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) registers under 1,500 daily encounters with migrants for three weeks. In April, daily encounters were almost 4,300.
Opening moves
Claudia Sheinbaum wasted little time in announcing her first cabinet pick, stating that Rogelio Ramírez de la O would stay on as finance minister when she takes office on 1 October. President López Obrador appointed Ramírez de la O to head up the finance ministry (SHCP) in July 2021, in a move that was broadly well received by economic analysts and even opposition politicians at the time.
Fiscally conservative and with experience of both the private and the public sector, Ramírez de la O has enforced the government’s austerity policies during his time in the role. His main challenge under Sheinbaum will be to manage the public budget balance, given that the new government will inherit a fiscal deficit of over 5% of GDP in 2024, its highest level in decades.
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