Mexico 2024 election updates: Claudia Sheinbaum faces Xochitl Galvez

The head of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, extended his congratulations to Sheinbaum. He said that he will seek to work together to achieve social justice for the people on the agenda of democracy, human rights, development, and security.

Nuestras felicitaciones a la primera Presidenta electa de México @Claudiashein.

Cuenta con la @OEA_oficial para trabajar conjuntamente y para la justicia social de nuestros pueblos la agenda de Democracia, Derechos Humanos, Desarrollo Integral y Seguridad

— Luis Almagro (@Almagro_OEA2015) June 3, 2024

Translation:Our congratulations to the first elected female President of Mexico, @Claudiashein. You can count on the @OEA_oficial to work together on the agenda of democracy, human rights, integral development, and security.

Mexicans are expected to send a woman to the presidential palace for the first time in the country’s history, about 71 years after women were first granted full voting rights in national elections.

By comparison, the United States first granted women the right to vote in 1920, but the country has yet to elect a female president.

During his time in office, outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has sparked controversy by promoting changes to the country’s elections oversight body that critics say would diminish its independence.

That effort is part of a longstanding scepticism towards such institutions on the part of AMLO, who pledged to “send institutions to hell” after a razor-thin defeat in his 2006 bid for the presidency.

He has long maintained the election that year was tainted by fraud.

Speaking to Al Jazeera outside of a Mexico City polling station, security expert Falk Ernst explained that criminal organisations in Mexico take an active role in trying to influence the vote.

They see it as a matter of survival, he explained.

“Elections are very attractive to criminal groups because essentially, as a criminal group nowadays in Mexico, your biggest asset is to gain access to the state,” he said.

“Institutions still decide who gets away scot-free with crimes – who gets to murder with impunity, to break it down like this. Essentially, as a criminal group, that leaves you condemned to gain a foothold in the state. Otherwise, you will lose against the competition and you will face the consequences. So all these criminal groups are pushing into the state by elections.”

Ernst estimates there are at least 200 active criminal groups in Mexico at the moment, making the race to influence government “very, very crowded”.

“They are financing campaigns, they are forcing voters to cast a vote in the right direction to them, to further their interests,” he said. “That means that violence is being used to secure this or the other group’s place within the state. And this is what we see visibly in the form of the killings of candidates.”

With violence overshadowing Sunday’s elections, it is little wonder that Mexican voters have ranked security and crime at the top of the list of issues concerning them this year.

In March, the survey company Ipsos asked voters to choose three topics that most worried them.

Crime came out at number one, with 53 percent of the Mexicans surveyed picking it as their top issue. That gave it a significant margin over other key issues, including unemployment at 35 percent, poverty at 30 percent, and inflation at 30 percent.

Ipsos also noted that this was a much higher ranking for crime than the global average. Overall, across the world, 30 percent of adults ranked crime among their most worrisome issues, placing it below economic issues.

Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been criticised for high rates of crime under his administration, with Mexico seeing five straight years of more than 30,000 murders recorded.

According to the country’s elections oversight body, the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), Mexicans are able to vote at about 170,000 polling places across the country.

That’s an increase from 2018, due to the fact that the number of eligible Mexican voters has increased by about 11 million people.

Amid reports of political violence in Coyomeapan, a town in the state of Puebla, misinformation has spread that voting has stopped in the area.

That, however, was not true, according to Mexico’s election authority, Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE).

It issued an “important declaration” to put an end to the rumours. It clarified that the violence did not occur inside the polling station and that voting continues in the town without impediment.

“At this time, voting in Coyomeapan, Puebla, continues as normal,” the notice read.

Aclaración importante: https://t.co/7KNjrABRUq

— @INEMexico (@INEMexico) June 2, 2024

Paula Sofia Vasquez, an independent political commentator, told Al Jazeera that surprises in the polling results may come as a result of the large number of young Mexicans voting for the first time.

People between 18 to 29 years old comprise the largest voting bloc by age in Mexico: They total nearly 26 million people or 26.5 percent of the electorate, according to data compiled by the Wilson Center, a US-based research institute.

Vasquez explained that this group could make a significant difference at Sunday’s polls.

“The forecast for the turnout was 65 percent, and the electoral [authority] said it might get adjusted to almost 70 percent. So we are having a lot of turnout, a lot of first-time pollers,” she explained. “We will have surprises, I believe, in the result.”

The Wilson Center noted that 74 percent of young voters felt that the main political parties in Sunday’s race did not reflect their interests.

Vasquez, however, noted that overall support was strong for presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, who has pledged to continue the policies of popular outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO.

“The president has stated clearly that this is a referendum for his project and that people who want to continue his project must vote for Sheinbaum,” Vasquez said.

“If Claudia Sheinbaum had been a little more disobedient, we can say she would have lost some of the various strong, supportive votes that AMLO has as his fan base.”

High temperatures have added to the difficulty of casting a ballot in some locations across the country.

“As the sun is reaching that high point in the sky, fewer and fewer people are willing to stand in line here,” Al Jazeera correspondent Manuel Rapalo reported from a polling station in Mexico City.

“We’ve also been told that authorities in other states, states like Campeche and Yucatan, people are being urged to wear cool clothing.”

Reporters have said that there are long lines of Mexican voters at consulates across the United States, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Washington, DC.

The US has by far the largest Mexican diaspora community in the world, with more than 37 million people of Mexican origin as of 2021.

Advocacy groups have been fighting for decades to make it possible for Mexican nationals to vote abroad. And they’re finally able to in today’s presidential election. This is in Houston, but this scene is happening all around the world today. https://t.co/JUh17sVhC1

— Pablo De La Rosa (@pblodlr) June 2, 2024

Lisa Sanchez, the executive director of the advocacy organisation Mexico United Against Crime, told Al Jazeera that this year’s elections are important for several reasons.

“This is a historic day, not only because we’re going to elect our first woman president but also because it was the largest and most violent electoral process,” she said.

The fact that the political violence was largely aimed at the municipal level points to a larger problem with corruption in governance, Sanchez explained.

“Eighty-seven percent of all the candidates that were aggressed or killed were actually running opposed at the municipal, local level, which is something that is very worrisome and talks about the need of actually tackling and attending to the problem of criminal governance that we have in Mexico at the very local level.”

But she also reflected on the significance of having so many women involved in the democratic process this year.

“It’s also historical election because the majority of the voters are women. Fifty-one million women are part of the list of electors and were going to be actually attending this election to elect over 20,708 different positions at the local, state and federal level.”

If Claudia Sheinbaum is successful in her bid for the presidency, she will become the first Mexican president of Jewish ancestry.

Sheinbaum has faced discrimination over her Jewish heritage on the campaign trail, with conservative former President Vincente Fox attacking her as a “Bulgarian Jew”.

“The only Mexican is Xochitl!” Fox added, a reference to Sheinbaum’s main rival, conservative candidate Xochitl Galvez.

Sheinbaum was born in Mexico City. Her Jewish grandparents fled Europe to escape anti-Jewish violence in the 1920s and 1940s.

The AP news agency has reported that a man was kidnapped at a polling station in the town of San Fernando, located in the southern state of Chiapas, citing the state Prosecutor’s Office.

“Two armed men burst into a local market where a voting station was set up and kidnapped the man. The man later appeared beaten up in another place,” the AP reported.

The country’s electoral commission has established a protocol allowing voters to choose whether to identify as man, woman or non-binary in the gender data section of their voting cards.

In recent years, the National Election Institute (INE) has also taken steps to promote the political representation of Mexicans from LGBTQ, Indigenous and African-Mexican communities.

In the town of San Nicolas Tolentino in central Mexico, a funeral procession for a murdered city council candidate is taking place as voters cast their ballots.

Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a mayoral candidate for Izucar de Matamoros, was killed on Friday at a political rally when armed assailants opened fire. His wife and a colleague were also injured in the attack.

He is one of at least 30 candidates killed during this year’s election season.

In the small town of San Nicolas tolentino, there is voting going on but also a funeral. Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a candidate for city council was assassinated on Friday. More than 30 candidates were assassinated in Mexico this election season. pic.twitter.com/aZ2XYIFuq5

— Eyder Peralta (@eyderp) June 2, 2024

The US State Department has issued a warning for visitors to Mexico to abstain from taking part in protests on election day, as Mexican law “prohibits political activities by foreign citizens”.

It added that a “strong military and police presence is expected” during the elections and that protests can sometimes turn contentious.

As Mexicans head to the polls across the country, hot weather is posing a challenge. Even in the normally mild-weathered capital of Mexico City, the temperature sits higher than average at 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit).

The country has suffered under a period of high temperatures in recent weeks, with reports of several deaths from heat-related illness.

“The climate is having a big effect,” Hugo Nava, a 71-year-old university professor, told the Associated Press as he waited in line to vote. “People are coming out early, because they don’t want to be here at noon.”

Media reports indicate that at least two people have been killed during voting in Sunday’s election.

Both incidents happened in the state of Puebla in central Mexico. In the municipality of Tlapanala, local media have reported that armed attackers killed a woman while trying to steal election material at a school-turned-polling station.

And in the town of Coyomeapan, a dispute between members of opposing parties allegedly turned violent, leading to one death, according to news reports. More details are still emerging in both cases, with AFP News citing a local government security source as confirming the deaths.

It was a case where the president’s words – and his administration’s actions – did not seem to match.

On Tuesday, the International Court of Justice announced that Mexico had requested to join South Africa’s case accusing the Israeli government of committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

But the very next day, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO, refused to define Israel’s actions as genocide.

“We don’t want to put ourselves into a definition of this type that, instead of resolving a conflict, aggravates it,” he said in his morning news conference.

It was the latest evidence of Lopez Obrador’s ambiguous, somewhat contradictory stance towards Israel and its war in Gaza, which is nearing its eighth month.

Lopez Obrador and his legacy in office have been under the microscope in recent months, as his political party – the National Regeneration Movement or Morena – prepares for a pivotal nationwide vote.

Sunday’s election is considered a referendum on Lopez Obrador’s outgoing administration, which enjoyed high popularity during its six years in office.

What will the legacy of his foreign policy be? And will his protege Claudia Sheinbaum continue his stance?

Read our coverage to learn what lies ahead.

Reporting from Mexico City, Al Jazeera correspondent Lucia Newman said the opposition coalition in Sunday’s vote is hoping a big turnout will weigh in its favour.

“The opposition, in particular, has been calling on the Mexican people to come out en masse and vote,” she said.

“It is not compulsory to vote in Mexico, so a high turnout is significant. According to the opposition, that may be their only chance of actually beating Claudia Sheinbaum, the continuation candidate who has been polling consistently between 15 and 20 points ahead of Xochitl Galvez.

“It’s also maybe very significant for the result of the mayor’s position – which is very important – of the capital Mexico City. The opposition, again, hopes that may get them, for the first time in a long time, to win that coveted post here in Mexico City.”

Newman went on to say she visited a polling station near the presidential palace in Mexico City, which was crammed with would-be voters.

“We are seeing a lot of people out there. We were just recently in one of the polling stations where the president voted, and we could see that the voting boxes were absolutely packed.”