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Outsider threatens to shake up Mexico’s presidential race
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Financial Times, 4 de julio
The decision by a self-made woman with indigenous roots and popular appeal to contest Mexico’s presidential elections next year has posed a threat to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s carefully-laid plans to keep his leftwing party’s grip on the presidency.
Born in poverty to an indigenous father, Xóchitl Gálvez sold homemade sweets in the streets of her town as a child before forging a successful career as a businesswoman, social activist and senator. Her father was an alcoholic and her sister has been in jail for 11 years awaiting trial on kidnapping charges, facts she openly volunteers.
She is now being talked of as an unconventional challenger who could provide López Obrador’s populist Morena party with serious competition next year, when the leader, known by his initials as AMLO, must relinquish the presidency under Mexico’s one-term limit.
Gálvez’s breezy, down-to-earth directness and her humble origins make her stand out from other opposition politicians in Mexico, who are often from privileged, European-descended families and seem more comfortable pitching to foreign investors than campaigning among the country’s rural poor.
Before she threw her hat into the ring it was easy for López Obrador, a master communicator, to dismiss his opponents as pampered bourgeois and paint himself as closer to ordinary people. Now he faces a challenge from a politician who argues that her life story makes her better qualified to help poorer Mexicans.
“I don’t talk from a position of privilege, I talk from experience,” the 60-year-old Gálvez, a senator, told the Financial Times in an interview at a Mexico City hotel. “I believe from my personal experience that people want to get on through their own merit. I don’t believe, like this president, that aspiration is bad.”
Her arrival has galvanised the ranks of the demoralised opposition parties PRI, PAN and PRD, many of whom privately admitted they stood little chance against López Obrador. With his marathon daily news conference dominating the airwaves, the president finds it easy to connect with Mexico’s underprivileged and brush aside problems which would have overwhelmed less popular leaders.
Gálvez has already succeeded against the odds in one of the world’s most unequal countries by escaping poverty in the remote town in central Hidalgo state where she grew up. She won a place at a public university and became a computer engineer before launching her political career, mostly under the wing of the conservative PAN. But to reach the presidency she faces more daunting obstacles.
She must navigate a convoluted selection process and convince the fractious opposition alliance of three very different parties to adopt her as its unity candidate. She is not yet well known outside Mexico City. And if she becomes the opposition candidate, she will face the might of López Obrador’s formidable political machine. She said she was ready.
“I’m a disruptive woman without any fear,” Gálvez said of her challenge to the political establishment. “I’m enjoying myself.”
She has a knack for attention-grabbing political stunts, including dressing as a dinosaur to make fun of old-guard political figures. A legal challenge to force López Obrador to allow her into his daily press conference won national attention. (He didn’t let her in).
The politician with the most to fear from Gálvez may be Claudia Sheinbaum, who last month resigned as mayor of Mexico City to campaign for the Morena presidential nomination and is widely regarded as López Obrador’s preferred successor.
“I come from [poverty], I represent the populations which are the poorest and most marginalised in the country,” Gálvez explained. She wanted to see children from Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest states, learning coding and English. “It was very hard for me to pass my first semester of university because of my low academic level.”
Some Mexican political experts, like Jorge Castañeda, rate her highly. “She is a very competitive candidate,” Castañeda said. “And she is an excellent campaigner. Her concept is that the message is the messenger.”
Denise Dresser, a professor of political science at ITAM university, said Gálvez had shaken up the race but still had to prove she could turn social media enthusiasm into national popular support.
She would also have to strike a balance between convincing the elites of the PAN, which held the presidency from 2000-12, to back her while appealing to a broader electorate, Dresser said. “I think this is going to be a challenge for her, to not be associated with past governments and past presidents.”
Gálvez has waved aside the caution of some allies who urged her to run first for mayor of Mexico City — widely seen as the second most powerful job in Mexico — before attempting a run at the presidency.
Her elected experience is limited to one term as a senator and a term as the mayor of Miguel Hidalgo, a wealthy Mexico City district, though she did hold a national position under the conservative government of former president Vicente Fox as head of a commission for indigenous peoples.
On Monday, López Obrador said he believed Gálvez would be the opposition candidate and painted her as tainted by her work for Fox and support from powerful business elites.
She believes López Obrador and his government are weaker than they seem, highlighting a high murder rate, a failing public health system, grandiose state projects that lack a business rationale and nationalistic economic policies which have scared off investors.
Is Mexico slipping into autocracy?
“The president is caught between fighting against a globalised world, his own ideals and economic reality,” she said. Nearshoring, the shifting of manufacturing from China closer to the US, was “the best opportunity Mexico has had in 100 years,” she argued, but López Obrador was not making the most of it.
Gálvez’s main challenge now is to collect 150,000 signatures to support her candidacy and show she can top debates, polls and a primary vote to win the opposition nomination, which will be decided by September 3.
Her heroes are Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa, and just one thing about becoming president of Mexico bothers Gálvez.
“I wouldn’t like to stop riding my bicycle,” she said. “The president should be just another person. When I saw the TV series Borgen, I loved that prime minister who went around on her bike.”
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