Mexico: Woman favored to succeed President Obrador

Mexico City’s head of government, Claudia Sheinbaum, 60, is increasingly leading voter preferences for the 2024 elections to succeed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

It is revealed by two polls published today by the Spanish newspaper El País, which gives her a 12% lead over Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, 62, who is known in political circles as “the vice-president” due to his influence with López Obrador, and the specialized newspaper El Financiero, which gives her a five-point difference.

According to the firm Enkoll, which prepared the study for El País and the local radio station W Radio, 82% of Mexicans would vote for a woman for the highest public office in the country in two years.

According to the survey, there is no doubt that the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena, center-left) will hold power in the next presidential term, as it is more than 10 points ahead of the entire opposition bloc, of which there is no certainty that it will compete united.

In the competition between parties, preferences are mostly in favor of Morena with 42%, followed by the conservative National Action Party (PAN) with 16% and the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with 11%.

The other three minority organizations, the Movimiento Ciudadano (MC, center), the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD, center-left) and the Partido del Trabajo (PT, left), each share 2% of the potential votes and the Partido Verde barely accounts for 1% but is currently Morena’s ally.

In the opinion analysis carried out between the 16th and 19th of this month, it is found that Morena could be awarded 55% of the votes, a figure higher than the 53% with which López Obrador won in the historic elections of June 2018.

“There is no opposing force with numbers that could yield a scenario of direct competition,” the conclusions of this measurement point out.

Claudia Sheinbaum recently hired the Spanish consultant Antonio Gutiérrez, who would be the “brain” of the strategy that allowed Gustavo Petro to win the presidency of Colombia last June 19.

In a different scenario in which Marcelo Ebrard would win Morena’s internal race, the El País poll reveals that this party would also win without problems, even with up to 63% of the votes against “weak” candidates such as the vitriolic PAN legislator Lilly Tellez and the popular governor of the western state of Jalisco Enrique Alvaro, from MC.

The El Financiero poll, conducted via telephone to 1,000 people between the 12th and 21st of the president, also shows that Morena would obtain the victory in the 2024 elections but with 52% of the votes, that is to say, one less than in 2018.

On the other hand, in the case of a hypothetical alliance of the opposition bloc, called “Va por México,” it would obtain just 35% of the potential suffrage.

Although according to El Financiero, Sheinbaum dropped from 42% to 39% in favorable opinions between July and August, and Ebrard dropped five points, they are still far ahead of their competitors in the internal race, the leader of the Morena bench in the Senate Ricardo Monreal and the Minister of the Interior Adán Augusto López.

Monreal would only obtain 12% of the potential votes, while López would be awarded 10%, according to the consultation.

Sheinbaum assured last week that “she will accept the results of Morena’s internal poll to choose the presidential candidate, even if they do not favor her”, stating that she “trusts her party”.

The aspirants performed a sort of “catwalk” a few days ago during the Third Plenary Meeting of Morena in the Chamber of Deputies, in which the most applauded was precisely the governor of the most populated city in the country.

Analysts note that López Obrador prefers Sheinbaum, considered his “dolphin”, while Ebrard serves as his advisor and envoy for the most complex issues, as happened with the procurement of vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With information from ANSA