MEXICO CITY — A street food vendor turned tech entrepreneur and senator is upending the race to succeed Mexico’s popular president, offering many voters the first real alternative to their country’s dominant party.
Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, helped her family as a child by selling tamales on the street. Today, the outspoken opposition senator is a long shot against Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party, which holds Congress and 22 of Mexico’s 32 states.
Despite her slim chances, Gálvez appears to have rattled the president so much that he has been insulting her almost daily during his morning briefings. The opposition senator sits comfortably in the national spotlight almost a year before the national elections on June 2, 2024.
“She fills a space that was completely empty,” said Roy Campos, president of polling firm Mitofsky Group. “The entire opposition population begins to see her and she generates hope.”
Next year’s election is López Obrador’s chance to show whether he has built a political movement that can outlive his charismatic leadership. Whoever succeeds him will have to contend with persistently high levels of violence, heavily armed drug cartels and migration across the nearly 2,000-mile border with the United States.
Campos’s group has not conducted a poll of opposition candidates, but that does not prevent it from feeling comfortable declaring Gálvez a “political phenomenon.”
Gálvez, a political independent who initially set her sights on running for mayor of Mexico City and often cycles through the growing capital, entered the Senate chamber in December dressed as a dinosaur, an allusion to leaders of the party known for their archaic and immovable practices. . At the time, López Obrador had proposed electoral reforms that critics say would weaken the country’s National Electoral Institute. The Senate approved them earlier this year, but the Supreme Court later blocked them from taking effect.
Gálvez never shies away from conflict with López Obrador. He went before a judge in December to ask for an order allowing him to speak at the president’s daily press briefing. He was granted the order, but the president refused it.
Gálvez’s fluent use of profanity, in contrast to his ease moving in political circles, is to the advantage of much of the working class and many young Mexicans. He registered this month to compete for the presidential nomination of a broad opposition coalition — the historically leftist PRD, the conservative PAN and the PRI that ruled Mexico for 70 years — joking that López Obrador was his campaign manager.
López Obrador remains wildly popular, and although he is unable to run for another six-year term, several high-profile members of his Morena party have been in fierce competition for months. They include Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard and Interior Secretary Adan Augusto, who agreed to step down last month to campaign in earnest.
Their faces are plastered on billboards across the country, while Gálvez makes witty videos, often shot on his own iPhone, some viewed millions of times.
Mexican society is looking for someone new to believe in, Gálvez told The Associated Press.
“We will have to see how much I can connect and how much I can convince,” he said.
Growing up poor in the central state of Hidalgo, his father was an Otomi indigenous school teacher. He was also abusive, macho and an alcoholic, Gálvez said. She learned to speak the native ñähñu from her as a child, she keeps her indigenous roots close to her and prefers to wear embroidered huipiles.
He worked as a scribe at a local civil registry office as a teenager. At the age of 16, she moved to Mexico City alone and worked as a telephone operator until she obtained a scholarship that allowed her to study computer science. She later founded a technology company that, as López Obrador recently pointed out, has won government contracts.
Gálvez served as indigenous affairs minister to President Vicente Fox, an outspoken politician from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) who broke the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 70-year stranglehold on Mexican politics.
Although he entered the Senate with the PAN, he has registered to compete for the nomination of the broad coalition of the country’s traditional parties.
Gálvez has assured PAN voters that he wants to continue defending them despite their attempts to win over other parties with interests outside the traditional conservative base.
His sense of humor and the ability to speak comfortably, even sometimes profanely, with people on the street are characteristics he shares with López Obrador. They may be the reason why he treats her as a threat.
The president accuses Gálvez of using his humble origins and speech to “deceive” the poor, who make up a large part of his support base. Instead, he paints her as the nominee of the rich, the “oligarchs” and the “conservatives”.
She dismisses him as a fearful macho.
“He’s going to try to deny my origins and deny my job, but there it is,” he said.
“I had to face a very patriarchal culture, very macho, where as women we were not seen for anything other than to work,” she said.
Gálvez said she is not discouraged by the challenge posed by the favorites of the president’s party.
“They are there because they want to continue doing the same as the president,” he said. “They have no identity of their own.”
Victor Gordoa, president of Public Image Group, said Gálvez’s life story is the kind that can reach people from all walks of life, resonating with the working class who see themselves in Gálvez, as well as the wealthy. who see it as a potential weapon that has been untouchable until now.
