Mister López
On Sunday, millions of Mexican voters are expected to flood poll sites to cast their votes in what seems to be a historical presidential election. Not only a new president will get elected, but the Mexican Congress will see more than 600 new members in September, and there will be a dozen new governors and thousands of mayors.
As with any other democratic country, the most significant election will be for the presidency. Mexicans will elect their next commander in chief, who will lead the nation for six years starting December.
The top three candidates running for the office are José Antonio Meade, a former cabinet member who runs under the umbrella of a coalition led by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, but who is not a member of any party at all. From the conservative side, the candidate is Ricardo Anaya Cortés, the former chair of the National Action Party, the same political organization that has governed our neighbors in Baja California for almost three decades. Last but not least, left-leaning candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador runs for the third time. López, a former Mexico City mayor, is running under the National Regeneration Movement, a party created few years ago after leaving the Democratic Revolution Party.
A fourth candidate, Nuevo León Gov. Jaime Heliodoro Rodríguez, is running as an independent but making a hilarious, satirical campaign.
According to serious polls, Lopez Obrador seems to be the favorite, named as the choice of one out of every two voters surveyed. Voters are hopeful the candidate known as “Peje,” a shortened version of Pejelagarto, an alligator-like freshwater gar common in López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco, will help reign in decades of corruption and problems like crime, education, jobs and others.
Mexicans seem poised to elect a candidate who can be seen as the Mexican version of Bernie Sanders.
As for his opponents, Meade was nominated as a candidate solely by President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the traditional “dedazo,” an unwritten provision of the PRI bylaws. Although seemingly accepted by party members as an honest, hard-working candidate, the former cabinet member in fact has not gotten much help in his campaign. It turns out party members preferred former Secretary of State Miguel Angel Osorio over Meade, who is suffering the consequences of corruption scandals by members of his party as well as the poor approval rating of President Peña.
Meanwhile, within the conservative National Action Party, things turned upside down in just two years. In 2016, former first lady Margarita Zavala was the frontrunner, according to polls. Like Osorio, Zavala was the preferred candidate of her party. However, the party’s National Chair Ricardo Anaya, a politician who has not held an elected office and who has been accused of betraying fellow members, was able to secure the nomination without a single vote. Although his party has almost always held internal elections to select nominees, it somehow abandoned that practice this election cycle.
Zavala left the party, ran as independent and quit after campaign debt increased and polls show her in a distant fourth place. But Zavala’s followers had become a pain for Anaya. Sen. Enrique Cordero filed a lawsuit at the Mexican Attorney General’s office accusing Anaya of money laundering.
Opposing candidate and their backers have aggressively attacked frontrunner López Obrador in ads and social media. But Mexican frustration with the status quo and the hope of a different way of doing things has created a shield around López, who is now on the verge to get half of all votes cast Sunday.
Though no polls have been conducted in Baja California, apparently the López Obrador political phenomenon will lead his party to seizing several congressional seats and at least an additional one in the Senate. If this tide continues into next year’s elections, the National Action Party will be at serious risk of losing the state’s governorship for the very first time in three decades. Arturo Bojorquez is Adelante Valle Editor.