Mexico City
CNN
—
An extraordinary campaign by the Mexican president to undermine one of the main opposition candidates in the country’s 2024 presidential election has prompted an official rebuke of the federal electoral authority and criticism that it is harming the democratic process.
It also appears to have an unintended effect: giving the coalition a much-needed boost with the aim of ousting his party.
A new poll this week by a Mexican newspaper showed Xóchitl Gálvez, a freshman senator vying for the entry of the Frente Amplio por México, a three-party alliance, within striking distance of the front-runners in the president’s left-wing party, a significant development in a race that had been widely tilted in favor of the president’s party.
Gálvez’s remarkable ascent as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has led to a near-daily stream of attacks against her.
In regular press conferences this month, López Obrador has called her “easy,” a “puppet” and an “employee of the oligarchy,” questioned her upbringing in poverty and, last week, released the private financial information of her business.
Gálvez has proven so adept at turning attention into momentum that commentators joke that the president has become his campaign manager.
“AMLO is obsessed with Senator Gálvez,” wrote Enrique Quintana, editorial director general of business newspaper El Financiero, in a recent column, using a nickname for the president. “Within a few weeks, it made her the most talked-about opposition candidate and considered by many to be the front-runner.”
“That’s gold to her,” political analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor told Americas Quarterly.
The immensely popular Lopez Obrador is barred by Mexican law from seeking re-election after completing his six-year term. Mass primaries began this summer to determine his successor, with the opposition coalition and Morena, the president’s party, selecting their candidates in September. The general elections will take place next June.
Despite disastrous pandemic policies that put Mexico among the countries with the highest Covid-19 death rates and the most unchecked cartel violence, López Obrador has enjoyed some of the highest favorability ratings of any world leader. Morena’s eventual standard-bearer – among the candidates is the recent mayor of Mexico City, known as her “political daughter and former secretary of foreign affairs” – has been considered as her likely successor.
With a compelling personal story and a penchant for headline stunts—he once dressed as a T. rex in the Senate to protest a controversial electoral reform, a proposal for political “dinosaurs”—Gálvez brought immediate energy and a media frenzy to an opposition contest that had not yet resonated with the public.
In a series of press interviews and viral social media posts, the senator, who represents the conservative PAN party but has championed a range of progressive political positions, has fought back with characteristic bluntness, calling the president reckless and sexist.
His position has jumped in the polls. In a new poll published this week by El Financiero, Gálvez’s support in the coalition primaries increased by nine percent from two weeks ago, putting her six points ahead of her closest candidate, the president of the lower house of Congress. In hypothetical confrontations against Morena’s three main candidates, she loses from five to 12 points.
“He wants to undermine me psychologically, make me fold, put me in a corner,” he said on CNN en Español’s Conclusiones program on Monday. “I’m a very badass woman. I’m a very bold woman. I’m a brave, forward-thinking woman. So this is just the beginning.”
López Obrador’s comment has drawn scrutiny from the National Electoral Institute, an independent agency. Last week, a complaints commission of the body said that López Obrador’s statements “may violate the principles of impartiality, neutrality and fairness” and ordered him to stop making “comments, opinions or statements on electoral issues”.
On Thursday, the court again agreed to order López Obrador to review a series of offensive comments.
However, he dismissed a complaint by Gálvez that the president had violated laws against gender-based political violence.
Electoral neutrality laws in Mexico date back to the 1990s, when lawmakers passed sweeping reforms in response to decades of one-party rule that allowed the outgoing president virtually unquestioned ability to select his political heirs.
The reforms established mechanisms to set the time periods during which campaigns could take place, regulated campaign financing, and limited how government officials can use public funds for political communication.
“With the use of the mañanera, which involves spending public resources, the social communication of the executive is being appropriated to attack a possible candidate,” said Arturo Ramos Sobarzo, director of the Legal Research and Informatics Center of the Free School of Law in Mexico City, referring to the president’s daily press conferences.
In the days since the ruling against him, López Obrador has moved between open disregard, half-hearted winking and grudging obedience.
After claiming he was not bound by the order because his office had not been formally notified of it, López Obrador shared online a document purporting to contain information about government contracts Gálvez’s technology services company had received. López Obrador wanted to link the candidate for the country’s historic leadership elite with the claims, which he has denied.
Gálvez has described the disclosure of information as an illegal invasion of his privacy and said he will file a complaint with the authorities.
Such brazen actions against a political rival are unprecedented in recent Mexican elections, legal experts say, but the tact is familiar for a president who has enjoyed shifting norms and targeting his perceived enemies.
In a widely condemned episode last year, López Obrador disclosed the salary of a prominent journalist — apparently taken from privileged government documents — after the journalist published an investigation into one of the president’s sons.
López Obrador has also pushed through a legislative package aimed at diminishing the electoral agency’s autonomy and its ability to punish politicians for breaking election laws, although the Supreme Court has struck down key parts of the measure.
With his disregard for the electoral verdict, López Obrador is “putting at risk what we Mexicans have built as democratic foundations,” said Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, director of international relations for the opposition coalition.
“We need the attention of international public opinion and pro-democracy organizations that will begin to take note of what we are beginning to face in Mexico in these elections,” he said.
