By Alfredo Corchado and Eduardo García
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MEXICO CITY — Outperforming even the rosiest predictions, leftist Claudia Sheinbaum has swept into Mexico’s presidency in a landslide that likely will enable her to accelerate the nationalist-populist program of her patron, who hands over power in four months.
Sheinbaum, 61, took nearly 60% of votes in a three-way race, double the support of her nearest opponent. The ruling Morena party, founded by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will control two thirds of both chambers of Mexico’s national congress and 24 of its 32 state governorships.
What Sheinbaum does with that mandate will define Mexico’s economic policy — including treatment of private investment in key industries like energy. Her government must also determine whether and how to alter López Obrador’s lackluster efforts against militarized criminal gangs. And it will be forced to decide on the treatment of hundreds of thousands of global migrants transiting the country enroute to the U.S. border.
For Texas and other U.S. border states, there’s a lot riding on how Sheinbaum proceeds. Mexico has overtaken China as the main U.S. trading partner, with some $800 billion in goods crossing the border. That trade is expected to jump as manufacturing returns to North America amid growing U.S.-China tensions.
“Texas is the destination, origin and transit point of two thirds of binational trade with Mexico,” said Tony Payán, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “The U.S. Mexico relationship runs through Texas, and the Mexican community in Texas is enormous — Dallas Houston, San Antonio Austin, El Paso. We’re talking a very intense relationship.”
Payán, who is also Professor of Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez, added: “I hope the next administration really, really understands that Washington (D.C.) is not everything. That the state capitals, whether it’s Sacramento, in California or Phoenix in Arizona, or Austin in Texas, are the places of power for Mexico City.”
Called the Fourth Transformation, or 4T, the Morena party’s economic and social program is aimed at improving the lot of Mexico’s poor and working class. Under López Obrador, the minimum wage has doubled, labor unions have grown a bit more free and needed cash has been delivered to the aged and other marginalized Mexicans.
In recent years, Mexico’s export-fueled economy has proved resilient. Its “super peso” gained 23% against the U.S. dollar since 2018 and is now considered among the globe’s strongest currencies. But some analysts say López Obrador’s anti-capital rhetoric has kept private investor’s money off the table.
“As supply chains move out of China, Mexico is one of the best-positioned countries in the world to take advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Globalization Myth”, which argues that regional economies like North America’s will emerge as an economic powerhouse in future years.
“The next government needs to double down on infrastructure, education, public safety, and clean energy to attract the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment up for grabs,” O’Neil said.
The United States accounts for two thirds of Mexico’s global trade, with economic ties reaching deep into the U.S. industrial heartland. With analysts citing the need for dramatic improvement in the electrical grid, highways and other public works, Sheinbaum in her victory speech sought to assure investors that she is open to working with them.
“We will respect entrepreneurial freedom and will honestly promote and facilitate both national and foreign private investment that fosters social well-being and regional development” Sheinbaum said. “Always ensuring respect for the environment.”
Energy investment, which was opened to Mexican and foreign investment a decade ago, only to be squelched under López Obrador, presents a critical test for Sheinbaum.
“The commitment to change course on the energy sector was clear with both candidates, yet the political baggage Sheinbaum carries will make it harder for her to move quickly,” said José Antonio Aguilar, a businessman who develops wind farms to generate renewable energy.
Sheinbaum’s resounding victory over Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate of a coalition of three opposition parties, might also signify the return of a one-party rule that characterized Mexico’s political system for nearly all of the 20th century.
It was Gálvez’s conservative National Action Party that ushered in greater democracy in Mexico by winning presidential elections in 2000 and then holding the office for 12 years. A member of Gálvez’s failed coalition, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled Mexico for more than 70 years before National Action’s victory.
But a record of mediocre rule by conservative presidents, and the PRI’s disastrous return to the office in 2012, became the foundation for Morena’s hold on power.
Critics fear that Morena’s bolstered political majority enables Sheinbaum — and López Obrador — to weaken civic institutions painstakingly created in the 1990s to safeguard democracy and limit presidential power.
This year López Obrador sent Congress a number of proposals to alter Mexico’s constitution. The proposals include limiting the power of the autonomous National Elections Institute, which oversees federal votes and direct election of judges, including members of the Supreme Court.
The proposals would also eliminate autonomous agencies that regulate energy, telecommunications and other industries that López Obrador sought to keep under government control by limiting private investment.
Morena lacked the votes to push the measure through the last Congress. But Sheinbaum ran her campaign in part on vows to make the limits a reality. With the Morena coalition’s strengthened majority, Congress reconvenes Sept. 1.
Sheinbaum’s 59% of the vote is six points greater than what López Obrador won in a four-way race six years ago.
This story is republished here with permission from Palabra, an initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. It was produced in collaboration with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
