In June, Mexico held federal, state and local elections. Claudia Sheinbaum, who had been the mayor of Mexico City, was elected the country’s first woman president. Her party, Morena, also gained a majority in both houses of the legislature and won at many other levels.
Sheinbaum has pledged to continue the progressive reforms that the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has put into place. These include improved rights in the workplace, requirements for democratic union elections, and strengthening social safety nets, like reforming the pension system to better support lower income workers when they retire. Prior to being a politician, Sheinbaum was an environmental engineer, and she has pledged to combat climate change and address its effects. One area that will need her attention is a water crisis that has left millions of Mexico City residents without water, and in other places leaves people without water while crops are irrigated.
Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, is a relatively new party formed from a coalition of many progressive parties and groups, not one standalone organization. Its name in Spanish, Movimiento Regeneración, means “National Regeneration Movement.” One of the main goals of the party has been addressing poverty by undoing the neoliberal economic policies that have allowed corporate profits to flourish at the expense of the working class.
Leaders of the Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), an independent Mexican union and a close UE ally for three decades, commented after the election that it will take time to accomplish the extensive work needed in Mexico to transform the lives of working people. “However,” they noted, “the policies implemented by the AMLO government were headed in the right direction: increases in the minimum wage, social support for unprotected groups, infrastructure development. These measures have made it possible to gradually reduce the high rates of poverty that have persisted in the country. The majority of Mexican society expressed at the polls not only support for these policies, but also their desire for them to continue and deepen, which Claudia Sheinbaum has raised within her government platform.”
The FAT notes that there is a lot of work to do to improve conditions for workers in construction and agriculture, as well as the informal economy, where work continues to be precarious with many violations of labor law (where it applies at all). They also hope for a larger budget for the Federal Center for Conciliation and Labor Registration that oversees union elections.
Candidates affiliated with Morena won six of the nine governor races open in 2024, including for the state of Mexico City, which surrounds the capital. Sheinbaum’s replacement as mayor of Mexico City will be Clara Brugada, also from Morena. Brugada had been the mayor of Iztapalapa, a borough of Mexico City, where she worked on improving public lighting and completing a public transportation line.
FAT leaders are aware of the work that needs to continue and will remain critical of the policies that need attention, but they are excited about “the triumph of the current president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum as a fact that will mark a starting point in Mexico.”
As his six-year term ends, Mexico’s pro-worker President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) is so popular that his successor was elected with over 58 percent of the vote. Political analyst Juan David Rojas told The Guardian, “AMLO’s popularity is always talked about as something inexplicable. But it’s very simple: He does things that Mexicans like.”
Maybe that’s why U.S. politicians are so keen to build a border wall: to keep crazy ideas like that from spreading into U.S. politics.