Mexico - 2024 race takes shape
With the official beginning of the 2024 race still months away, candidates are starting to compete (unofficially) for Mexico’s presidency.
For the 2024 elections in Mexico, public opinion polls favor Morena candidates and Morena as a party compared to other parties in the country. It’s a rare incumbent advantage in a hemisphere that has gone through a five year anti-incumbent wave that arguably began with AMLO’s election in 2018. However, in spite of Morena’s rise, the party still underperforms the president and AMLO has had some challenges passing his support along to other candidates. So while Morena is the early favorite, the election is not a shoo-in for the ruling party.
It’s unclear whether a united opposition coalition will hold for the 2024 race. The PAN, PRI, and PRD have teamed up to form the Va por Méxcio coalition for this year’s gubernatorial races and next year's national elections, but fissures within the coalition exist. MC, a small party with outsized influence given its control of key positions in Nuevo León and Jalisco, has said it would not join the opposition coalition as it currently exists but has encouraged other parties to join with them.
Mexico will elect a new president to serve a 6-year term, vote for all 500 seats of the lower house of the country’s legislature, and elect 128 members of the senate. The official campaign will begin later this year, but many candidates are getting an early start to their campaigns.
Morena state of play
Within Morena, polls show that the race is Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum versus Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard versus everybody else. Sheinbaum polls in first place in the party, but her lead over Ebrard is not large. Her public image suffered some damage after the series of metro scandals earlier this year, though Ebrard deserves some criticism on that topic as well. Other Morena hopefuls include Adán Augusto López, who Carin Zissis of AS/COA argued could be a dark horse candidate, and Senate President Ricardo Monreal, whose loyalty to Morena if he loses the nomination appears to be tenuous at best.
There has been a lot of talk about how the party will go about selecting a candidate to run for president. Mexico does not have a centralized primary, and the parties can exercise complete discretion over how they select presidential nominees. Ebrard and Monreal have called for more formal primary procedures like debates and a proper vote. Meanwhile, Sheinbaum has balked at these suggestions arguing that debates would only give opposition parties ammunition to attack Morena in the general election.
Regardless of what the party decides to do about a primary, the institutional mechanism is largely smoke and mirrors. López Obrador is going to have the final say in selecting a candidate. The president wants to run Morena like the 20th century PRI, and he will honor the tradition of the dedazo in selecting a successor. (Within Hxagon we disagree over who López Obrador will pick when the time comes - Boz thinks it will be Ebrard, Lucy thinks it will be Sheinbaum).
Of course, despite recent attacks against Mexico’s electoral institutions, López Obrador’s influence will be diminished in the actual election and he cannot select the next president the same way as he picks his party’s successor.
Opposition state of play
The opposition campaigns/candidacies are not as advanced as Morena’s, but there are a couple of figures worth watching in the coming months.
The first is Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, the current Mayor of Monterrey. Colosio Riojas has substantial name recognition, in part due to the legacy of his father who was assassinated while campaigning for president in 1994. Simultaneously, he does not have the baggage of being a member of the PRI or the establishment opposition. He’s a member of the Movimiento Ciudadano party, a party that has grown to prominence in the state of Nuevo León and seeks to offer a progressive-leaning alternative to Morena. Colosio polls higher than any other opposition figure, and higher than most Morena presidential hopefuls as well. Colosio has the right qualities to be competitive in the presidential election, particularly in an environment where the Mexican population has shown large distrust of the traditional political parties. However, his key strength is also his weakness nationally. He would start far behind on party organization compared to Morena and would have to overcome the resources AMLO has put into traditional grassroots party politics. Colosio told reporters he will not confirm whether he is running until later this year.
Margarita Zavala— former presidential candidate, wife of Felipe Calderón, and PAN deputy—is likely to announce a presidential bid too. Zavala polls reasonably well compared to other opposition figures, and she could be a potential candidate to represent the PRI-PAN-PRD coalition if the coalition holds.
With a plurality election, the possibility that Colosio and Zavala (or other opposition candidates) split the anti-AMLO vote appears to be a likely scenario. That potential opposition divide is one reason Morena has an edge.
Signals to watch
Gubernatorial elections slated for June 4 in Estado de México and Coahuila will be early indications for Morena’s and opposition parties’ standing going into 2024. The two states have historically been conservative strongholds, and Morena victories in one or both states would signal Morena’s strength ahead of the national race.
Alternatively, given López Obrador’s substantial influence over selecting a successor within Morena and selling the public on whoever he picks, it will be important to watch his approval rating between now and the election. As we predicted in March, López Obrador’s approval rating took a hit as a result of his efforts to reform the country’s electoral authorities, and any sign that López Obrador himself is weakening in the public arena could spell trouble for a Morena nominee in 2024.
Finally, it’s worth monitoring Mexico’s basic economic and security situation. Mexico’s economy has significantly underperformed AMLO’s promises in every year he has been in office. While 2023 appears to be better, any drop in the global or US economic outlooks would hit Mexico hard. On security, López Obrador has had the most violent sexenio of any Mexican president. His claims of recent improvements ring hollow contrasted with the fact that homicides and other violent crime statistics remain far worse than they were a decade ago. Major security incidents that highlight AMLO’s failures could harm his party’s political standing. It’s also worth monitoring what other candidates say about the security situation and how criminal groups play into the election. Mexico’s criminal groups have prospered under the past two administrations and would not react well to a hawkish candidate who promises a harsher crackdown.
Thanks for reading
Hxagon is helping companies navigate the scenarios for Mexico’s upcoming elections and what the various outcomes could mean for politics, economics, energy, and security. Feel free to contact info@hxagon.com if you’d like to schedule a call to discuss political risk in Mexico or anywhere else in Latin America.