The two great candidates for the presidency of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez, will face each other, along with the third candidate in the running, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, in the first of the three debates agreed before the presidential elections. The ruling party Sheinbaum starts with a great advantage, 20 points ahead of Gálvez in the polls.
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The candidates for the presidency of Mexico hold their first debate this Sunday in the midst of the diplomatic crisis with Ecuador and the growing violence that has claimed the lives of several candidates for regional positions.
The spotlight will be on the official candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, with a 20-point advantage, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a center-right opponent whose disadvantage suggests that she will take risks to try to close the gap in voting participation.
In third place is Jorge Álvarez Máynez, a former deputy who was named standard bearer of Movimiento Ciudadano (center left) at the last moment and will seek to make himself known.
There are three debates agreed before the general elections on June 2 and they are divided into themes. In the first. This Sunday, the dominant themes will be the fight against corruption, health and education.
Read alsoMexico is preparing to elect its first president
The complex issue of insecurity will be addressed in the third meeting, possibly the most anticipated of the three debates because it will allow the candidates to interact, while in the first two they will answer questions from moderators.
Along with the violence linked to crime and the more than 450,000 murders recorded by the government since December 2006, attacks against politicians are multiplying in Mexico, with 23 candidates murdered in this electoral process, according to the consulting firm Integralia.
The ruling Morena party is the one that has suffered the most from the loss of candidates, including Gisela Gaytán, who was running for mayor of Celaya (center) but was shot to death on Monday when she was finishing her first rally and was surrounded by supporters.
Read alsoNo political party escapes electoral violence in Mexico
Diplomatic tension with Ecuador
The unprecedented police intervention in the Mexican embassy in Quito to arrest former Ecuadorian vice president Jorge Glas has led to the opposition closing ranks with the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The leftist president declared the breaking of relations in the face of what he described as a “flagrant violation of international law.”
Gálvez was the first to join the sentence. “The diplomatic headquarters of any foreign nation are inviolable,” he wrote in
The escalation with Ecuador was framed in comments by the Mexican president, who on Wednesday drew parallels between the violence that marked the 2023 Ecuadorian presidential campaign, with the murder of candidate Fernando Villavicencio, and the violence in the campaign in Mexico.
López Obrador suggested that the Villavicencio crime created a “rarefied atmosphere of violence” that, added to the “manipulation” by some media, caused the fall in the polls of the leftist candidate Luisa González and the rise of Daniel Noboa, who was the winner.
This led Quito to declare the Mexican ambassador persona non grata on Thursday, and on Friday Mexico agreed to give asylum to Glas, who has taken refuge in the Mexican headquarters since December and who alleges political motives after the corruption accusations against him.
Foreign policy was also left for the third debate, unless the candidates use their time to refer to this diplomatic crisis.
According to a survey conducted by the firm Oraculus, Sheinbaum has 59% of the voting intentions, Gálvez with 35% and Álvarez Máynez with 6%.
