23 days before the conclusion of the campaigns and 26 days before election day, there are those who maintain that everything has already been decided, however, in my opinion, there are some issues that do not fit to support the above.
The transition of our democracy has brought with it, among other things, differentiated voting, so that automatic voting for all positions for the same political party is not necessarily the rule.
On the other hand, there is undoubtedly an interrelation between local and federal problems, histories and leaderships at the moment in which citizens define the meaning of their vote, the question is knowing how much one consideration weighs on the other.
It is also worth taking into account that the decision to coincide the dates of the federal and local elections (16 years ago) affected the framework of the influence of the federal on the local and vice versa. What remains to be seen is whether there are patterns in this regard and the level of interrelation.
What is clear is that in the 2018 elections the figure of López Obrador—who by then had accumulated four decades in a national campaign—coupled with the vote of punishment for the unsatisfactory results of the three six-year terms of the democratic transition and in particular the head by Peña Nieto, marked the triumph of the current president and dragged with them the formation of the Congress of the Union and the local elections.
In such a way that we can affirm that people who were fortuitously nominated for a federal or local candidacy occupied executive and legislative positions that they did not expect, for which they had not prepared and in some cases for which they did not even campaign.
Six years ago, national unrest generally marked all the votes, but it was a wave that did not affect Jalisco, Yucatán or Guanajuato, although in the latter case abstentionism had its highest record in many elections. Nor did AMLO’s 30 million votes impact the formation of the Congress of the Union in the same way. Which shows that, fortunately, social behaviors do not obey automatic correlations.
However, 2024 may be different. The unrest due to the neglect of state and municipal demands and deficient local governments can not only change the result by entity, but also affect federal elections. An obvious example in this regard is Morelos, in which a bad decision when selecting the candidacy, added to the discomfort due to the insecurity and frivolity of the outgoing government, will undoubtedly cause an alternation.
The 2021 midterm elections, the revocation of mandate in 2022, as well as the State of Mexico elections in 2023, indicated important changes in the electorate. As for the intermediate ones, Morena and her allies lost the qualified majority they had in the Chamber of Deputies. On the other hand, nine of the 16 mayors of CDMX became governed by the opposition.
For the revocation of the mandate, only 17 percent of the citizens registered on the nominal list participated, that is, 16.5 million, and last year for the gubernatorial election in Edomex, citizen participation barely reached 50 percent and the The difference between the current governor and her competitor was reduced to 7 percent against all expected forecasts.
The previous numbers must be observed beyond the results, since they also denote the mobilization capacity of the parties or what we want to see from the other perspective of the interest that the elections arouse among the voters.
Let’s now see what the very near June 2 may have in store for us. Seven entities concentrate more than 50 percent of the voters, in that order: Edomex, CDMX, Jalisco, Veracruz, Puebla, Guanajuato and Nuevo León. In all of them, perhaps only with the exception of Puebla, the competition will apparently be very intense. In the capital of the country and in Veracruz there could be an alternation. In Jalisco, Guanajuato and Nuevo León, local preferences will apparently be renewed and do not favor the parties in federal power and in the State of Mexico, if the trend of recent years continues, at least a technical tie is emerging.
Yucatán, although it barely reaches 2 percent of the national list and will therefore have little bearing on the result for the presidency of the Republic – despite being the state with the highest level of participation – will reveal the citizens’ recognition of the good governments.
Another fundamental factor that will affect the result this June 2 is citizen participation, as we have already seen in other installments. I maintain that the greater the participation, the greater the possibility of alternation in general.
This set of data and others that we cannot refer to in this brief space, lead me to think that everything is yet to be defined. The level of citizen participation and the punishment of bad local governments with the citizen vote will affect the result beyond the popularity of the current president and the mistakes or successes of the candidates in turn.
POSTSCRIPT: On several occasions we have referred to the Senate’s willful omission in not exercising its responsibility to fully integrate the electoral courts in the country and the consequences that this may have for the timely qualification of the electoral results and their legitimacy. Added to that now is the pressure and threats against the members of the complaints commissions of the INE and the Electoral Institute of CDMX. To further confirm the suspicions that we are facing an authoritarian presidentialism, the National Palace uses the State apparatus with impunity against María Amparo Casar, a citizen who deserves clear answers to her legitimate, informed and brave questions in the face of the citizenship.
