Mexico president election: Claudia Sheinbaum vs. Gálvez, Álvarez Máynez | EUROtoday

The front-runner is Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a former mayor of Mexico City, 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 occasion and a longtime icon of the left. (He’s constitutionally barred from reelection).

Here’s an introduction to the presidential contenders. Voters on Sunday can even select a brand new Congress, the Mexico City mayor, eight governors and greater than 20,000 native officers in Mexico’s 31 states and the capital.

Sheinbaum grew up in Mexico City, 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 e book “Claudia Sheinbaum: Presidenta.”

Disciplined and pushed, Sheinbaum adopted her mom, biologist Annie Pardo, into science. Sheinbaum earned a PhD in electrical engineering on the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, a standard coaching floor for Mexican leaders, and performed doctoral analysis on the University of California at Berkeley for a number of years within the Nineties.

She has printed dozens of educational articles on vitality, the surroundings and sustainable improvement, and contributed to stories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which gained the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

If elected, Sheinbaum can be the primary Jewish head of state in predominantly Catholic Mexico. She’s recalled celebrating holidays corresponding to Yom Kippur along with her grandparents, who fled discrimination and Nazi persecution of their native Bulgaria and Lithuania. But she is just not personally non secular.

As a pupil, 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 scholar motion, Carlos Imaz, and their residence grew to become a gathering place for leftist politicians. One of them, López Obrador, grew to become mayor of Mexico City in 2000, because the nation accomplished its transition from a one-party, authoritarian state to democracy. He invited Sheinbaum to be his surroundings secretary.

In 2004, scandal shook Sheinbaum’s household when a video emerged displaying her husband, then a Mexico City 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 ultimately divorced.

In 2015, Sheinbaum grew to become borough president of Tlalpan, in southern Mexico City. Three years later, as López Obrador gained the presidency, she was elected mayor of the capital. She is named 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 help to poorer Mexicans and consolidating the federal government’s position within the vitality sector. But she desires to reorient the nation towards renewable vitality, and rely extra on the police and nationwide guard — quite than the military — to scale back violence and crime.

Sheinbaum and Imaz raised two youngsters; one is an instructional who lives within the United States, the opposite an artist. In November, Sheinbaum married a pal 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 government who has pursued her political profession within the conservative National Action Party, 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. (Both have since died.)

At 16, Gálvez moved by herself to Mexico City, the place she rented an attic condominium in a working-class neighborhood and located work as a phone operator. She was quickly admitted to the UNAM, and studied pc engineering.

Gálvez based two tech firms that contribute to the design and upkeep of “intelligent” 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 ultimately elected chief of the Miguel Hidalgo borough of Mexico City, and in 2018, a member of the Mexican Senate.

Gálvez is understood for carrying conventional Indigenous attire and touring round Mexico City 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 every day morning information convention. She needed to rebut his fees 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 lady 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 United States and attracting extra firms to near-shore their manufacturing nearer to the U.S. market.

Gálvez and her longtime companion, the enterprise government turned-musician Rubén Sánchez, have two grownup youngsters.

Máynez, 38, is a long-shot candidate, representing a small however rising occasion referred to as the Citizens’ Movement. 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 Technology and Higher Studies of the West. At 25, he grew to become a state lawmaker for the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Three years later, he resigned from the PRI and joined the centrist Citizens’ Movement.

He jumped into the presidential race in January after the withdrawal of the occasion’s hottest presidential candidate, Samuel García, the governor of the northern state of Nuevo León.

Máynez says he would cut back the nation’s reliance on the navy to combat organized crime, set up a authorized, regulated marketplace for marijuana, and shift the state-owned oil and electrical energy firms towards renewable vitality.

Rios reported from Monterrey, Mexico. Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.