Mexico voted amid political polarization

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The June 6 midterm election in Mexico passed relatively calmly in most of the territory. More than 95% of the polling stations were installed and in some municipalities where organized crime collides with politics, there were incidents such as theft, destruction, or burning of electoral packages, in addition to the purchase of votes through pantries or cash.

While waiting for the first results and projections, which will arrive from the National Electoral Institute (INE) in the early morning of Argentina, we can speak of very high participation that for the first time in an intermediate will exceed 50% of the electorate. A very high percentage of participation in the largest elections in history with more than 20,000 positions in dispute, including the 1,325 municipal presidencies, 500 federal councils, and 15 of the 32 governorates of the country, that is, half of the territorial power.

These elections are held amid a climate of political polarization, a polarization that has continued for the last 3 years since the 2018 presidential campaign, and which turned the elections into a referendum on the policies and government of López Obrador. In this sense, everything seems to indicate that the opposition did not achieve its objective since it seems that Morena and his allies (the Green party and the Labor Party) are going to maintain an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies (251 deputies and 500 deputies) .

Regarding the governorships, the President of Morena Mario Delgado announced at the beginning of the electoral night that Morena has 8 insurance (Zacatecas, Guerrero Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Colima, Campeche, Nayarit, and Sinaloa) which would grant the opposition 7, leaving a draw that would actually be a bad result for Morena, since a few months ago there were chances of victory in 14 of the 15 (all except the State of Querétaro, in the hands of the conservative PAN right).

But that scenario was reversed with a controversial measure or at least difficult to understand from an ideological point of view, but effective from an electoral point of view, such as the union in a coalition of the PAN (right), PRI (center), and PRD (old left). until the arrival of Morena). The parties that supported Peña Nieto's Pact for Mexico, which promoted the privatizations, now joined the Va x México coalition with a single, explicitly declared objective: to confront workers at the polls.

Although the opposition coalition has been able to compete electorally, the social, political, and economic reality is dominated by the labor movement, which despite losing support among the urban middle classes, expands the electoral base with the popular sectors historically excluded from the State, sectors that now they receive benefits and social programs, especially the elderly.

All this in the middle of a pandemic from which Mexico is beginning to emerge, with a public policy that prioritized investment in beds, ventilators, and doctors, to avoid the saturation that we could see in other countries, and that has made the North American country one of the 10 countries in the world that more vaccines. In the last week, one million vaccines per day have been reached, for a total of more than 34 million doses applied (Mexico has received more than 43 million doses).

Electoral uncertainty

In the absence of official results from the INE, and as is customary in many electoral days, all political actors can say that they have won, and are partially right. Obradorismo accounts for more than half of the disputed governorates, which together with the 6 it already has (Baja California, Chiapas, Mexico City, Puebla, Tabasco, and Veracruz) will give it control of 15-16 of the 32 of the Republic, leaving the other half in the hands of the opposition. And with regard to the Chamber of Deputies, Morena and allies maintain the legislative majority that they already had, but it does not seem that they are approaching the qualified majority (which they did have) that would allow constitutional reforms.

Therefore, the catastrophic tie between obradorismo and opposition, facing the next 3 years facing the election of 2024 in a country without the possibility of presidential re-election and the formation of a kind of bipartisanship with 2 large blocs, obradorismo (Morena together with the pragmatic Green Ecologist and the Maoist PT) and opposition (PRI-PAN with the PRD as a satellite in case of reaching 3% of votes that would allow it to maintain the national electoral registry).

In this election, there were also 3 new parties from the labor sector competing, Fuerza Por México, Redes Sociales Progresistas, and Encuentro Solidario, which will hardly reach the 3% that allows them to have a national registry (they could add some uninominal deputies in case of winning their district).

Therefore, an uncertain scenario, the one that opens in the Latin American country that, together with Brazil, shares the G20 with Argentina.