The front-runner is Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a former mayor of Mexico Metropolis, who holds a double-digit lead in polls over rival Xóchitl Gálvez. Sheinbaum is promising to proceed the applications of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, founding father of the Morena celebration and a longtime icon of the left. (He’s constitutionally barred from reelection).
Right here’s an introduction to the presidential contenders. Voters on Sunday may even select a brand new Congress, the Mexico Metropolis mayor, eight governors and greater than 20,000 native officers in Mexico’s 31 states and the capital.
Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico Metropolis, the daughter of two leftist scientists. The household was near Raúl Álvarez Garín, a frontrunner of the 1968 pro-democracy protests that had been brutally suppressed by safety forces. As a woman, Sheinbaum joined her dad and mom in taking meals to him in jail, she mentioned in an interview for the ebook “Claudia Sheinbaum: Presidenta.”
Disciplined and pushed, Sheinbaum adopted her mom, biologist Annie Pardo, into science. Sheinbaum earned a PhD in electrical engineering on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico, or UNAM, a standard coaching floor for Mexican leaders, and performed doctoral analysis on the College of California at Berkeley for a number of years within the Nineteen Nineties.
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She has printed dozens of educational articles on power, the atmosphere and sustainable improvement, and contributed to studies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
If elected, Sheinbaum could be the first Jewish head of state in predominantly Catholic Mexico. She’s recalled celebrating holidays reminiscent of Yom Kippur along with her grandparents, who fled discrimination and Nazi persecution of their native Bulgaria and Lithuania. However she just isn’t personally spiritual.
As a scholar, Sheinbaum plunged into college politics, serving to manage a profitable strike on the UNAM in 1987 in opposition to a rise in charges and a tightening of entrance necessities. She married a frontrunner of the coed motion, Carlos Imaz, and their dwelling turned a gathering place for leftist politicians. One in every of them, López Obrador, turned mayor of Mexico Metropolis in 2000, because the nation accomplished its transition from a one-party, authoritarian state to democracy. He invited Sheinbaum to be his atmosphere secretary.
In 2004, scandal shook Sheinbaum’s household when a video emerged displaying her husband, then a Mexico Metropolis official, receiving a bag of money from a businessman linked to corruption. Imaz was accused of violating the electoral regulation, however later exonerated. The couple finally divorced.
In 2015, Sheinbaum turned borough president of Tlalpan, in southern Mexico Metropolis. Three years later, as López Obrador received the presidency, she was elected mayor of the capital. She is called a meticulous problem-solver, and a low-key however fiercely loyal disciple of the president.
Sheinbaum has promised to observe López Obrador’s insurance policies of accelerating support to poorer Mexicans and consolidating the federal government’s position within the power sector. However she desires to reorient the nation towards renewable power, and rely extra on the police and nationwide guard — relatively than the military — to cut back violence and crime.
Sheinbaum and Imaz raised two kids; one is a tutorial who lives in the USA, the opposite an artist. In November, Sheinbaum married a buddy from her school days, Jesús María Tarriba, an financial threat analyst.
Gálvez, 61, represents a coalition of opposition events from the center-right and center-left. She’s a plain-talking enterprise govt who has pursued her political profession within the conservative Nationwide Motion Occasion, or PAN.
Gálvez grew up in a rural city within the central state of Hidalgo, the daughter of an Otomí Indigenous father and a mixed-race mom. She has made her life story the central narrative of her marketing campaign. As a woman, Gálvez offered jello cups and tamales on the road to help her household. She says her father, a schoolteacher, drank closely and abused her stay-at-home mom. (Each have since died.)
At 16, Gálvez moved by herself to Mexico Metropolis, the place she rented an attic residence in a working-class neighborhood and located work as a phone operator. She was quickly admitted to the UNAM, and studied laptop engineering.
Gálvez based two tech corporations that contribute to the design and upkeep of “clever” energy-efficient buildings.
In 2000, newly elected President Vicente Fox, of the PAN, named her to go a federal fee that oversees Indigenous affairs. She was finally elected chief of the Miguel Hidalgo borough of Mexico Metropolis, and in 2018, a member of the Mexican Senate.
Gálvez is thought for sporting conventional Indigenous attire and touring round Mexico Metropolis on a motorbike. In June 2023, she seized the highlight by showing on the presidential palace and demanding to be admitted to López Obrador’s each day morning information convention. She needed to rebut his prices that she favored eliminating authorities pensions for the aged.
He refused her entry. That touched off a confrontation that made Gálvez well-known, celebrated for her witty, typically off-color ripostes. She has portrayed herself as unafraid of the highly effective president, a girl with the “ovaries” to face as much as organized crime.
She’s campaigned on tackling crime, strengthening authorities watchdog establishments created in the course of the democratic transition, bolstering ties with the USA and attracting extra corporations to near-shore their manufacturing nearer to the U.S. market.
Gálvez and her longtime associate, the enterprise govt turned-musician Rubén Sánchez, have two grownup kids.
Máynez, 38, is a long-shot candidate, representing a small however rising celebration referred to as the Residents’ Motion. The federal deputy has centered his marketing campaign on the youth vote, portraying himself as the one candidate who can change “old-style Mexican politics.”
Máynez grew up within the northern state of Zacatecas and earned a level in worldwide relations from a Jesuit college, the Institute of Know-how and Increased Research of the West. At 25, he turned a state lawmaker for the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Occasion, or PRI. Three years later, he resigned from the PRI and joined the centrist Residents’ Motion.
He jumped into the presidential race in January after the withdrawal of the celebration’s hottest presidential candidate, Samuel García, the governor of the northern state of Nuevo León.
Máynez says he would scale back the nation’s reliance on the army to battle organized crime, set up a authorized, regulated marketplace for marijuana, and shift the state-owned oil and electrical energy corporations towards renewable power.
Rios reported from Monterrey, Mexico. Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.
