With more than 98 million eligible voters, some 70,000 candidates and over 20,000 public offices being contested, Mexico’s general election Sunday is the largest in the country’s history.
But it’s not just the massive scale of the event that makes it so important in the eyes of observers across the border in the United States.
For the first time in history, the country looks set to elect its first female president. The two front-runners are both women – Claudia Sheinbaum, of the Morena party, who is backed by the governing coalition Sigamos Haciendo Historia, and Xóchitl Gálvez, who is backed by a coalition of opposition parties.
The vote is also important because it falls in the same year as the US presidential election – something that happens only once every 12 years – and comes at a time of transition in the relationship between the two countries.
“The years when all the US wanted was a safe and stable Mexico are over. Now it is also interested in a country with good public policy,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro Medina, director of the Center for US-Mexico Studies at the University of California, San Diego, pointing to the increasing number of Latinos in the US and the two countries’ growing ties.
Here are a look at some of the biggest issues affecting the US-Mexico relationship that will be influenced by Sunday’s vote:
Economy: Mexico became the United States’ top trading partner last year, surpassing China and Canada. Experts say this is largely because geopolitical issues such as the pandemic, the legacy of Trump’s trade war against China, and the war in Ukraine all encouraged near-shoring – the relocation of supply chains nearer to home – which boosted US imports from Mexico and its investment in the country.
Migration: While migration across the countries’ 1,933 miles long border is a shared concern, the issue is much lower on Mexican politicians’ agenda than in the US — where it could be a decisive factor in the November vote, according to Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas website. “The speeches of Sheinbaum and Gálvez on migration are neither very strong nor very different from each other, nor do they address too much what to do with migrants in the country,” she said. The rub for US politicians is that they need buy-in from their Mexican counterparts if their own immigration policies are to succeed.
Fentanyl and the drug trade: Security is another pillar of the bilateral relationship, particularly in terms of the thriving cross-border drug trade that blights both countries. While the United States has been grappling with a domestic health crisis due to the amount of fentanyl on its streets, Mexico faces increasing cartel-linked violence – including in the run-up to the election which has been marred by dozens of assassination attempts and other political violence.
