The biggest change brought by Mexico’s recent general election came as no surprise. The election of the country’s first female president was a foregone conclusion, as the candidates of both main alliances were women.

What was unexpected was the huge margin of victory for the winner, Claudia Sheinbaum of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), the leftist populist party founded by outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, generally known by his initials, AMLO. Sheinbaum received almost 60 per cent of the vote, six points up on her predecessor’s haul and more than double the votes for her conservative rival, Xochitl Gálvez.

The two women couldn’t be more different. Gálvez, of the centre-right National Action Party (PAN), is a former senator and tech entrepreneur of Indigenous descent. Sheinbaum, in contrast, comes from an intellectual middle-class background, started off as a student activist and spent her entire political career alongside AMLO. Her first political position was as his Secretary for the Environment when he was Mexico City mayor in the early 2000s – a role she more recently occupied.

But Sheinbaum, an energy engineer, projects a very different image from her mentor. Out of the fact that she’s a woman and a climate scientist arise two of the biggest questions about her presidency. Will Sheinbaum, unlike her predecessor, move away from fossil fuels and push for an energy transition? And, having celebrated her election as a victory for all Mexican women, will she place gender justice at the top of the agenda and take effective action to address the femicidal violence that claims over a thousand lives each year?

Morena’s landslide victory gave it solid majorities in both houses of Congress, leaving it only three Senate seats shy of the two-thirds majority required to change the constitution, and posing a third key question: what will the new government do with all this power? Under AMLO, political control was increasingly concentrated in the hands of an already powerful presidency, institutional and societal checks and balances deteriorated, judicial autonomy diminished and civic space suffered. State capture and an increasingly authoritarian political culture are major factors accounting for Mexico’s recent democratic backsliding. Civil society will be hoping Sheinbaum doesn’t stick to her predecessor’s path.

Political violence

Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a politician, and these elections were the most violent on record. According to a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, political violence has significantly increased over the past three years. It’s also changed in nature: until 2018, violence mostly targeted candidates and was concentrated in north Mexican states. Now it targets government officials as well and has spread throughout the country. Around 80 per cent of political assassinations target local-level politicians.

Criminal groups have diversified their activities. On top of drug trafficking, they’ve made inroads into areas as diverse as controlling alcohol sales, charging for public utilities such as electricity and distributing social assistance. A de facto system of governance has arisen where they play economic, political and social roles. In many places, local politicians have no choice but engage with them: their options are, as the saying goes, ‘plata o plomo’ (money or lead) – they either take the money they’re offered to collaborate, or they’re killed. Attacks by organised crime groups are overwhelmingly lethal. Mexico is rated the fourth most violent country in the world, and the most dangerous for its citizens, directly targeted by competing cartels and organised crime groups.

According to a civil society monitoring group, Causa en Común, at least 32 candidates and 24 public officials were murdered during the 2024 election campaign. The state of Guerrero led the body count, followed by Michoacán and Chiapas.

AMLO accused the media of ‘sensationalism’ for its reporting of election-related violence, even though his party had the highest number of politicians killed. On election day, at least 24 polling stations in several states couldn’t open due to armed attacks, assassinations of candidates and voters, attempted arson and ballot box theft. The attorney general’s office received 192 complaints of electoral crimes and made four arrests. The government downplayed the incidents.

The reality is that in some places, running for office requires the implicit blessing of local criminal bosses – and even then, candidates mustn’t mention sensitive issues, particularly corruption, impunity and violence. This discourages many from running while others pull out: in some places nobody wants the mayor’s job. This dramatically reduces voters’ options. Wherever candidates are assassinated, turnout drops and fewer people volunteer to administer elections.

Turnout on 2 June was lower than in the past. Only around 60 million of close to 100 million registered voters went to the polls.

Party politics

As well as the presidency, over 20,000 positions were at stake on 2 June, including 500 House of Representatives seats, 128 in the Senate, state governorships, including of Mexico City, state legislatures, mayorships and municipal councils.

The left-leaning coalition ‘Let’s Keep Making History’ – led by Morena and including the Green Ecological Party of Mexico and the Labour Party – faced a conservative coalition composed of PAN, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), collectively called ‘Strength and Heart for Mexico’.

The PRI was Mexico’s dominant political force for much of the 20th century, partly thanks to fraud and repression. PAN was the major conservative rival that brought the PRI’s ruling streak to an end in 2000. The PRD was a supposedly progressive 1980s splinter from the PRI. Many saw this alliance as a historical aberration and a testament to AMLO’s impact, with the hope of defeating him the only thing keeping it together.

AMLO is one of the most popular outgoing presidents in Mexico’s history. But an absolute ban on re-election is a legacy of the Mexican Revolution even he didn’t dare challenge. His leadership, however, was vindicated in the latest election, with public distrust of long-established parties featuring heavily in the campaign. Sheinbaum toured all 32 Mexican states, constantly evoking the memory of the corruption and incompetence of PRI and PAN governments and promising to keep pushing the ‘fourth transformation’ forward.

AMLO was heavily involved in Sheinbaum’s campaign. For close to a year, he used his daily morning conferences to support her and attack Gálvez. Thousands of civil servants toured communities across Mexico, speaking to beneficiaries of government social programmes and suggesting that if the opposition won, support would disappear.

Running as AMLO’s surrogate, Sheinbaum exceeded his vote, winning with the biggest margins in the poorest states, such as Chiapas and Oaxaca. She won in all but one state, while Morena won seven of nine governorships, including Mexico City. The coalition ended with its largest-ever number of legislative seats– 370 in the Chamber of Deputies and 82 in the Senate.

Unresolved issues

The outgoing president leaves behind a highly polarised legacy. AMLO connected with people at a deep level, in stark contrast to his predecessors who were clearly part of an aloof, privileged elite. But as a populist, he believed he held a monopoly on representing the interests of Mexican people and sought to concentrate power by attacking independent institutions, critical media and civil society.

He improved wages, increased social spending and public investment in infrastructure and lifted millions out of poverty, while bringing economic stability. Unsurprisingly, opinion polls found a huge difference between those receiving social assistance, a majority of whom voted for Sheinbaum, and those without it, who mostly voted for Gálvez.

Still, a third of the country’s 130 million people continue to live in poverty, and inequality remains very high. The economy grew very little during the last government, leaving the budget deficit at its highest in over two decades, suggesting that Sheinbaum may at some point have to adopt some politically unpopular economic adjustment measures.

Violence remains the biggest elephant in the room. In the 2000s, two presidents declared a ‘war on drugs’ that failed miserably. Violence only increased. AMLO initially promoted a policy of ‘hugs, not bullets‘ (‘abrazos, no balazos’), aimed at addressing the deep social causes of violence. While Sheinbaum campaigned on the same promise, it’s clear this strategy has long failed, as the government tacitly recognised when it decided to militarise security.

There are now hundreds of armed criminal groups fighting for control of territory, responsible for around 80 murders per day. Mexico continues to have record numbers of murdered journalists. For the sixth year in a row, over 30,000 murders were recorded in 2023. During AMLO’s six years in charge, violence claimed 190,000 lives with another 100,000 disappeared. Ninety-nine per cent of enforced disappearances are never resolved.

Migration – both in and out of Mexico – is another unresolved and connected issue. Around a third of migrants entering the USA are Mexicans fleeing poverty and violence. Mexico is also the route for Central and South American migrants trying to reach the USA by land. Many of them never make it that far or are turned back trying to cross the US border and end up staying in Mexico. The Mexican government’s agreements with its US counterpart to militarise the border are partly responsible for this situation.

During the campaign, Sheinbaum pledged to bring industry to the southern state of Chiapas to address the region’s unemployment crisis and tackle the root causes of its record levels of emigration. She promised that half of new jobs would go to established Chiapas residents and half to Central American migrants.

But she’ll also need to be mindful of the environment. Her predecessor dismantled climate policies and promoted energy sovereignty through increased domestic production of fossil fuels. Climate change is hitting Mexico hard, with over half the country facing drought and the average amount of water per person reaching dangerously low levels.

Sheinbaum has promised qualified change. She’s pledged to drive the energy transition, electrify transport and reduce greenhouse gas emissions – but she remains committed to continued fossil fuel use. She has supported a recently built oil refinery, natural gas pipelines and petrochemical plants.

Major doubts

Sheinbaum became Mexico’s first woman president a full seven decades after women gained the vote, and shortly after the country achieved gender parity in the governing cabinet and Congress. But Mexico has record levels of gender-based violence, with an average of 10 women murdered a day, and women’s rights activists complain there’s been no progress in tackling this. While AMLO has dismissed criticism, often claiming it’s fuelled by right-wing political opponents, Sheinbaum has promised to create a Femicide Prosecutor’s Office.

For the next few years, the ruling coalition will be well above the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution in the House, and only three seats short in the Senate. As a former president, AMLO will be in a unique position, because this supermajority is held by the party he created and still effectively heads. He’ll likely keep pushing for 20 constitutional changes he proposed, including numerous social policies but also voting for Supreme Court judges and top election officials and the transfer of the National Guard to the Ministry of Defence, which the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

As his surrogate candidate, Sheinbaum was compelled to identify fully with AMLO during the campaign. But now she’s the president, she could be a different kind of politician. She promised continuity, but ultimately she’ll be measured by the degree of change she can bring on major unresolved issues, from climate change to gender inequality and violence.

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