Mexico made history on June 2, 2024, when it elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum. These elections were the largest in Mexico’s history, with representatives for more than 20,000 public office positions at the congressional and local levels chosen, according to the AP. Election results are likely to be finalized later this week, but Sheinbaum was declared the winner of the presidential election based on a very high margin of victory in preliminary results reported late on June 2.

SIS Distinguished Diplomat in Residence and former US Ambassador to Mexico Earl Anthony Wayne was on the ground in Mexico City serving as an election observer. We caught up with Wayne to ask about what he saw while observing the election and what these preliminary results mean for the nation’s future.

You traveled to Mexico to serve as an election observer for this year’s general election. Can you briefly describe what you saw?

Observing the Mexican elections in Mexico City was invigorating—so many Mexican citizen volunteers staffing the polling stations and serving as monitors for the political parties and so many citizens committed to voting even with long waits. 

I saw the first volunteers arriving at one station around 7 a.m., to set up under an awning on the sidewalk, and the poll workers and party observers worked until around 9 p.m., after counting and double counting the votes by hand and reporting the results. In some of the polling stations we visited, the voters were clearly deeply committed to exercising their right to vote. Some told us they had already been in line for over two hours and had at least one more hour to go, but they were enthused to vote and committed to doing so no matter how long it took.

While the press reports said that about 18 percent of the planned voting stations across the country could not be set up because of various threats, the voting process seemed to roll out relatively smoothly in most places, even if the process was slow in some stations. We did hear from a few individuals at the voting stations we visited that the governing Morena party had an intense ground game and had regularly gone door-to-door in lower income neighborhoods to get their voters to come out early to vote.

One respected opposition analyst told me after the polls were closed, however, that the election was lost long before the voting began. He said his firm estimated that in the best of circumstances, the opposition presidential candidate would only come within 10 points of the winning Morena candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, and the gap could easily be much larger. In the preliminary results, she is around 30 points a number that one of her advisors told was larger than expected. The opposition analyst described how the President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, had been running the election campaign for most of the past six years by using his media skills to dominate daily messaging, by funding government programs to win support from his base of poorer Mexicans, and by violating agreed rules of the game set out by the election authorities with relative impunity. And, on the other hand, the opposition remained divided in its efforts and dividable by AMLO.

The focus now must shift to the outcome of the Congressional elections, where the results will take several days to calculate, in part due to the mix of direct and proportional election of legislators. This will be key for the vigor and tenure of AMLO’s push to win approval for his proposed constitutional reforms before he leaves office on October 1. If the pro-Morena parties win two-thirds of the seats in Congress, they can pass some of AMLO’s reforms in September. These reforms could result in a significant centralizing of power in the hands of the executive branch with fewer checks and balances.

Mexico elected its first female president during this election. What is the significance of this election result? Did Mexico’s 2019 constitutional reform seeking “parity in everything” pave the way for this to happen?

It’s really been an evolution over the past decades, but I’m sure [the constitutional reform] helped greatly. What the parity in representation law did was make sure that [Mexico] had a lot of female candidates for lower-level jobs. So, it became a more regular phenomenon to see women in Congress and to see women running for governor. We have had women run for the presidency of Mexico before; they had just never won. So, this has been a gradual change in the perception of Mexicans toward women participating in leadership positions, and this will be the biggest test to date.

Even with this impressive victory, Claudia Sheinbaum will face significant challenges. This includes managing US relations with the most focus likely on migration, cross-border crime, and trade and investment disputes. Getting the management of these vital issues right would be hard in any situation, but she will need to deal with the impact of the US elections in November and the likelihood that migration through Mexico, drug smuggling from Mexico, and the future shape of US-Mexico trade and investment relations will be key issues raised by Republicans during the US campaign. At the same time, Sheinbaum will need to assemble her own governing team and action plans, deal with the push for constitutional reforms, and work on establishing her own “presidential image” independent from that of her very popular predecessor and mentor, AMLO, who will still be on the scene.

What do the results of this election tell us about Mexico’s electoral scene?

Mexico’s electoral scene reflects AMLO’s impressive success in winning and maintaining popular support over six years. It reflects the weakness of the opposition in presenting an alternative vision for Mexico. The outcomes also reflect the weakening support among Mexicans for some democratic practices that would check the power of the chief executive. Many studies have tracked the deterioration of democratic and governance practices over the past decade. And it follows that the election outcomes suggest that AMLO has identified and taken advantage of structural weaknesses in Mexico’s democratic system that deserve further scrutiny.