A Woman President is Not Enough: How the Mexican Election Reveals the Facade of Identity Politics
Claudia Sheinbaum at presidential campaign launch in March. Photo courtesy of Eneas De Troya.
On Friday, March 8, Mexico made headlines during International Women’s Day. Nearly 30,000 people took to the streets to protest the country’s gender-based violence known as “machismo.” This “strong-man culture,” as roughly translated in English, is ingrained in Mexican life, with approximately 10 women dying from domestic violence daily across the country. Indeed, Mexico’s total number of femicides in 2022 tower over the rest of South America’s, trailing only Brazil. As such, Mexico suffers from a dark history of femicide that infects quotidian life for women across the country.
Paradoxically, Mexico is doing well with gender representation in its political institutions, at least on paper. Mexico is preparing to welcome its first woman president this June, as both frontrunner candidates are women. Additionally, Mexico is a world leader in female government representation, with women comprising 50% of its Congress and nine out of 31 state governorships since 2018. The central bank’s president is also a woman, and there is nearly equal gender representation in the Supreme Court as well.
The dichotomy between the country’s ingrained legacy of domestic violence and the widespread presence of women in government reveals the fragility behind mere representation. Femicide rates have steadily remained at over one victim per 100,000 women since 2017, though female representation in government has grown in the same period. Although Mexico will elect a woman president on June 2, her election does not mean Mexico’s legacy of femicide will subside.
The upcoming election will test the strength of the incumbent Morena party, which first won the presidency in 2018 and is led by the left-wing, populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The 2018 election marked a departure from the establishment’s dominance of the Mexican political system, and it instilled a renewed sense of hope for change among the masses. Though AMLO has maintained broad popular support across his six-year tenure, his presidency has been marked by growing polarization. The outgoing president might consider himself a threat to the establishment, but he is also widely recognized as a threat to historically respected political norms in Mexico. Prestigious policy think tanks and journals such as Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, and The Economist have long deemed AMLO a threat to Mexican democracy, as evidenced by his attempt to overhaul the National Electoral Institute (INE) and politicization of the Mexican military.
Importantly, the president also has a tainted record on women’s issues. He caused widespread outrage last August for claiming that his critics could be accused of committing “‘gender-based violence’ against him.” In response, AMLO doubled down by rhetorically asking reporters during his morning press conference, “‘is gender only female?’” Many prominent feminists and women viewed this as insensitive and out of touch, especially considering his inability to counter the country’s high femicide rate. Though AMLO campaigned in 2018 on the promise to reduce femicide, rates have actually risen throughout his tenure. Currently, 12 women die from femicide each day in Mexico, which has risen from 10 per day in 2018 when AMLO was elected.
In light of AMLO’s failure to curb femicide, voters will choose between two accomplished, female presidential candidates on June 2. AMLO’s Morena has strategically selected Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City. The opposition candidate, Xóchitl Gálvez, is backed by a coalition of establishment parties, including the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Both candidates have unique backgrounds. Gálvez has indigenous roots, and Sheinbaum has Jewish heritage. However, their identities are not representative of their political bases. Gálvez repeatedly fails to garner indigenous support, whereas Sheinbaum avoids her Jewish identity. Instead of appealing to identity, both candidates reach out to voters on the campaign trail by focusing their messaging on socioeconomic policies.
If voters elect Sheinbaum, she would become Mexico’s first Jewish president. However, Sheinbaum has rarely centered her Jewish identity throughout her political career. She has not declared a public stance on the Israel-Hamas war and is not known to be affiliated with a major Jewish community in Mexico. Still, appealing to the Mexican Jewish base is not politically advantageous, as Jews make up less than 1% of the population. Moreover, supporting Israel is likely to anger her leftist base, many of whom have expressed dismay with their country’s support of the Jewish state, having set fire to the Israeli embassy in late May.
Unlike Sheinbaum, Gálvez repeatedly makes references to her identity to appeal to Mexico’s large indigenous base through the use of traditional indigenous clothing and incessant references to her upbringing. As indigenous people account for over 20% of Mexico's population, Gálvez’s references to her indigenous upbringing are strategic appeals to this voting base. Nonetheless, these claims remain unsuccessful, as Gálvez lags in the polls by 17%. These statistics are not exclusively indicative of this shortfall, since Gálvez is also struggling to appeal to other voter groups across the country, even in her home town of Tepatepec.
Another base that the candidates seek to appeal to is the female base. Both candidates’ platforms acknowledge the country’s alarming femicide rates and include reforms to tackle them. Each includes practical reforms, with Sheinbaum campaigning to require female lawyers in every public ministry and Gálvez promising academic scholarships to children orphaned because of femicide. Both also pledge to investigate every female death as a femicide. These reforms, however, are reactionary instead of preventative, as they fail to tackle or identify the root causes of femicide.
I, like many others, am excited to see Mexico take this revolutionary step in electing a woman president and hope to see them realize their platforms on equality. As evident through an analysis of their identities, Sheinbaum and Gálvez’s ethnic and religious backgrounds are not indicative that they will pass inclusive policies. The significant milestone achieved by the election of Mexico’s first woman president should not distract from the pervasive, gendered violence destroying the lives of so many women on a daily basis. In a country plagued by femicide, the president’s sex is merely trivial without concrete reforms to reduce the femicide rate to zero.
Rosie Alchalel is a staff writer for CPR and a sophomore at Barnard College studying political science. She’s passionate about connecting to her Mexican roots through studying Latin American politics. Among her favorite things are long walks in the park, iced oat lattes, and short stories by Joan Didion.