With Mexico’s presidential election just three months away, one thing is clear: The candidate for the governing party appears to be running away with it.
Claudia Sheinbaum, a physicist and protégée of the current president, holds a commanding lead of about 30 percentage points in the polls over the opposition’s Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur, as campaigning officially starts on Friday.
Playing it safe at a time when the departing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, remains broadly popular, Ms. Sheinbaum has kept so closely to his policies and persona that she not only vows to adopt his priorities, she also sometimes imitates his slow-paced way of talking in appearances across the country.
But while Ms. Sheinbaum’s exceptionally disciplined campaign has cemented her front-runner status, the candidate who could be Mexico’s first female president remains something of an enigma to many Mexicans.
“Claudia Sheinbaum is still the great mystery of this election,” said Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, a political scientist at Mexico’s Monterrey Institute of Technology. “We know she’s a scientist with a different way of thinking. Sooner or later she’ll have to remove her mask showing her as the mimic of López Obrador.”
For now, the race highlights how Mr. López Obrador, a combative politician blending leftist and nationalist rhetoric with policies that are socially, environmentally and fiscally conservative, has so dominated Mexican politics since taking office in 2018 that a splintered opposition is struggling to find its footing against his would-be successor.
Ms. Gálvez, a senator with Indigenous roots who represents a coalition of mostly conservative parties, made a splash last year when she entered the race. But she has not gained much traction at a time when Mexico’s economy is benefiting from a shift in manufacturing from China, making Mexico the United States’ top trading partner.
Ms. Sheinbaum, who is a member of Morena, the governing party, and is a former mayor of Mexico City, has steadily emphasized her closeness to the president, who is universally known by his initials, AMLO.
Born to Jewish parents in Mexico City, she became an expert on energy issues after studying physics and energy engineering in Mexico and doing doctoral research at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Despite Ms. Sheinbaum’s lead, experts say that polls could be misrepresenting voter sentiment and that the race, which culminates in the election on June 2, remains far from over as the candidates spar over their plans for the world’s largest Spanish-speaking country.
“There is a good percentage that’s only now going to start making decisions about which candidate they’re persuaded by,” said Lorena Becerra, a pollster and political analyst.
Ms. Gálvez could not be reached on Thursday, and a spokesman for Ms. Sheinbaum said that for now they would not comment on the voting trends.
But as March begins, Ms. Sheinbaum is backed by 63 percent of people enrolled to vote, according to a tabulation of polls by Oraculus, an organization that standardizes and aggregates the country’s voting surveys. Ms. Gálvez, her main opponent, has 31 percent — or a difference of the equivalent of nearly 20 million votes.
A third presidential candidate, Jorge Álvarez Maynez, who is from the Citizen Movement party and is a progressive politician, has lagged with 5 percent.
“Morena arrives in unbeatable condition,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political scientist at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico City. Reflecting on Mexico’s recent election cycles, he added, “Never has the official candidacy had so much wind at its back as it has now.”
Several factors favor Ms. Sheinbaum and her party; above all, perhaps, are Mr. López Obrador’s high approval rating, which surpass those of any other president in the country’s past four administrations.
Forging a visceral connection with many voters who had felt abandoned by other presidents, Mr. López Obrador has prioritized popular antipoverty programs during his six-year term (presidential re-election is prohibited by law in Mexico.)
About 25 million families have benefited from direct cash transfers. The government has increased subsidies to lower fuel prices and electricity bills. And it has developed major infrastructure projects, including an ambitious train line in the Yucatán Peninsula, as a way to develop historically poor regions.
While Ms. Sheinbaum has not played a role in creating these policies, she has pledged to follow Mr. López Obrador’s steps, in large part by consolidating some of his major infrastructure projects, carrying out his austerity measures and keeping his popular social welfare programs.
But unlike her mentor, said Mr. Pérez Ricart, the political scientist, “we can, for sure, expect a candidate who is much more detailed in execution. If it was López Obrador’s charisma that kept his numbers up, she’s going to have to replace that with efficiency.”
There is already some evidence that a Sheinbaum administration could differ from her predecessor’s in some key ways.
When she was mayor of Mexico City, her management of the pandemic differed drastically from the federal government’s response. Ms. Sheinbaum tried to follow the science as Mr. López Obrador downplayed the risks. She has also said that she would focus on renewable energy in contrast to Mr. López Obrador’s prioritization of fossil fuels.
Then there’s the persistent issue of security. He has trusted the armed forces to deal with rising violence; Ms. Sheinbaum vowed to improve the training of the police, increase their salaries and invest in intelligence, measures she put in place while mayor of Mexico City.
Each strategy’s results are in. While reports of extortion and disappearances have shot up across the country, homicides, theft and other crimes in Mexico City have dropped by about 60 percent.
“The differences are in front of us,” Mr. Pérez Ricart added. “She clearly has a different way of governing and has demonstrated that over the last few years.”
Ms. Gálvez has also hinted at some proposals, including allowing private investments to modernize the country’s indebted oil company and promoting renewable energy sources.
She would also create a national investigative police force and reduce the military’s power.
Concerns over security are part of the campaign conversation as Mexico prepares for its largest ever election, with voters choosing national offices all the way down to the municipal level.
Since June, Laboratorio Electoral, an independent research institute focused on democracy and elections, has documented at least 67 attacks, threats, kidnappings and killings related to the elections. At least 39 people have been slain, 19 of them candidates for local positions. A significant portion of the violence is linked to cartels and other criminal groups seeking to influence who holds office.
Looming over the race is the presidential campaigning unfolding in the United States. While President Biden’s re-election would signal continuity, a victory by Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, could upend Mexico’s politics by making the country’s reliance on trade with the United States into a source of vulnerability.
Mr. Trump’s campaign is pursuing a proposal for a universal tariff of 10 percent on imported goods. Such a tariff would “present the next president of Mexico, whomever she is, with a challenge that AMLO and his predecessors didn’t face,” said Andrew Rudman, director of the Mexico Institute at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Mr. López Obrador himself could be another destabilizing factor if his protégé wins the presidency. His plan, as he has claimed multiple times, is to disentangle himself from politics and move to a ranch in Palenque, in the southern state of Chiapas, that his parents left him and his siblings.
Many in Mexico have a hard time believing that Mr. López Obrador could just fade into the sunset.
“A character the size of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the capacity that he had to mobilize emotions and, with that, make up for many of his government’s shortcomings — well, Claudia Sheinbaum is not going to have that,” said Blanca Heredia, a political analyst. “And it will be difficult not to compare her, especially at the beginning, with him.”
The post Mexico’s Presidential Race Is Shaping Up to Be a Blowout appeared first on New York Times.