Mexico votes in an election likely to choose the country’s first female president
expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress. Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.
Early turnout appeared to be high in the capital with long lines of voters under clear skies. Morena hopes to gain the two-thirds majority in Congress required to amend the constitution to eliminate oversight agencies that it says are unwieldy and wasteful. The opposition, running in a loose coalition, argues that would endanger Mexico's democratic institutions.
Both major presidential candidates are women, and either would be Mexico's first female president. A third candidate from a smaller party, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, trails far behind. Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is running with the Morena party.
Sheinbaum, who leads in the race, has promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice. Opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, whose father was Indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms. A candidate running with a coalition of major opposition parties, she left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets" policy.
She has pledged to more aggressively go after criminals. The persistent cartel violence, along with Mexico's middling economic performance, are the main issues on voters' minds. On the fringes of Mexico City in the neighborhood of San Andres Totoltepec, electoral officials filed past 34-year-old
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