As a child, she sold tamales, now she is emerging as the ‘outsider’ in the elections in Mexico

A street food vendor turned tech entrepreneur and senator is shaking up the race to succeed the popular president of Mexico and offering many voters the first real alternative to the dominant party in the country.

Xóchitl Gálvez, 60, helped her family as a child by selling tamales on the street. Today, the opposition senator is a long shot against the Morena party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which controls Congress and 22 of Mexico’s 32 states.

Despite her slim chances, Gálvez has rocked the political world, including the president who has been attacking her in his morning conferences for weeks. The opposition senator, who usually wears embroidered huipiles in an expression of her attachment to her indigenous roots, is in the national crosshairs almost a year after the presidential elections on June 2, 2024.

“She fills a hole that was completely empty”said Roy Campos, president of the local public opinion research firm Consulta-Mitofsky. “The entire opposition population begins to see it and generates hope.”

Next year’s elections will be the opportunity for López Obrador to demonstrate whether he has managed to build a political movement that can last beyond his six-year term. Whoever succeeds him, he will have to deal with high levels of violence, heavily armed drug cartels and a significant flow of migrants across the 2,000-mile border with the United States.

Although the Consulta-Mitofsky firm has not conducted any recent survey of opposition candidates that includes Gálvez, Campos did not hesitate to identify her as a “political phenomenon”.

Gálvez, an independent politician who initially set out to run for mayor of Mexico City and often cycles through the capital, entered the Senate in December dressed as a dinosaur, an allusion to party leaders known for their archaic practices. At the time, López Obrador had proposed electoral reforms that critics say would weaken the National Electoral Institute. The Senate approved them at the beginning of this year, but later the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation prevented them from entering into force.

Gálvez never shies away from conflict with López Obrador. In December he went to a judge to get a court order to give him a right to reply at the presidential conference. The measure was granted, but the president ignored her and did not let her speak in “the morning”.

Gálvez’s frequent use of high-sounding words contrasts with his comfort in moving in political circles, but is an advantage in reaching out to the working class and youth. He registered this month to run for the presidential nomination of a broad opposition coalition, which includes the historically leftist PRD, the conservative PAN and the PRI that ruled Mexico for 70 years, and civic organizations, joking that López Obrador has become his campaign manager in the face of recurring attacks on him in his morning conference.

López Obrador remains very popular, and although he cannot run for another six-year term, several leading members of his Morena party have been in fierce competition for months. Among them are the former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, former Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, and former Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto, who resigned from their posts last month to compete for the pro-government presidential candidacy.

Their faces are on hundreds of billboards throughout the country, while the senator confronts them by writing messages on small cardboard and recording videos next to the billboards to compare the resources used in the pro-government campaign. “My spectacular, your spectacular… where is the wool (money) left over?”

Gálvez said in an interview with The Associated Press that he believes that Mexican society is looking for someone new to believe in. “You have to see how much I manage to connect and how much I manage to convince.”

That June morning, Gálvez tried to take advantage of the presidential rostrum to tell Mexicans that she had no intention of eliminating a state program to support the elderly, and to deny what the president had said. As she explained after her, the fact that she grew up in poverty in the central town of Tepatepec, Hidalgo state, did not make her averse to social programs aimed at those with fewer resources.

His father was an Otomi indigenous man with alcoholism problems who beat his mother, who was mestizo. She learned to speak the ñähñu language as a child by listening to her grandparents, and she preserves and defends her indigenous roots.

He started working at the age of 8 selling jellies and tamales to help his family, and then as a teenager he got a job as a clerk at the local civil registry. At just 16 years old, she moved to Mexico City on her own where she worked as a telephone operator until she got a scholarship that helped her finish her computer engineering studies. After graduation, she started a technology company and became a successful businesswoman, wife, and mother of two.

Although Gálvez’s life story represents her greatest strength, her strident personality is also estimated by analysts to help position her as a powerful rival to fight the ruling party candidates.

Gálvez’s political career spans more than two decades. She was head of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples in the government of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), a PAN politician who broke 70 years of PRI dominance in Mexican politics. Later she was the mayoress of the upper-middle-class capital municipality Miguel Hidalgo between 2015-2018.

It is an independent politician with progressive ideas that supports the LGBT+ community and tours the capital by bicycle. She entered the Senate hand in hand with the PAN, although she has not registered with that organization. When defending her political independence, she said, before the PAN leaders, the day she registered her candidacy: “Don’t get mad at me if I don’t have an ID, but I don’t have a marriage certificate and I’ve been with the same husband for 30 years.”

Her sense of humor and simple language, laden with big words and street slang, is a characteristic she shares with López Obrador, which perhaps explains why he seems to view her as a threat.

Since mid-June, the president has used his morning conference—Mexico’s main political showcase—to attack her by identifying her as the candidate of the “conservatives” and”oligarchs”, and has accused her of using her poor background and popular language to “cheat” to the majority poor sectors, which are part of the base of followers of López Obrador. “Let her go to where the fifís live (as she calls the rich), and they are going to vote for her, very sure”said the ruler on June 12, denying Gálvez access to his morning show.

More recently, she was mocked for riding a bicycle through Mexico City. “At this point in time, you can’t want to play (put) your finger in people’s mouths,… Let’s see, I get on a bicycle or arrive on a tricycle: ‘Tamales, tamales, delicious tamales’; and not any more? Or say some rudeness.”

Far from being intimidated, Gálvez has quickly reacted to the criticism of the popular ruler and other ruling party figures with attractive videos, some made with artificial intelligence, which he has posted on social networks as part of his campaign.

“Here there is no production. Here there are no millions of pesos behind me. There is creativity in my head”said the senator when talking about how she has used her knowledge of computer engineering to design her campaign messages on social networks, in some cases with the sole help of her iPhone, which have garnered millions of views in a short time.

Gálvez also makes use of humor, which she assures is always with her, and laughs when talking about how López Obrador tries to label her as someone linked to the upper class and sectors of power and to benefit from dubious contracts, and attributes the recurring criticism to the concern that her application caused her and the annoyance she had when she rejected an offer to join his government team.

“He tries to say that I am from Polanco (an upper-middle class neighborhood in the Mexican capital)… and he will try to deny my origin and deny my work, but there it is”indicated the policy by acknowledging that she achieved a good economic status thanks to a successful career as an engineer and businesswoman.

The difficult times that he lived in his childhood, marked by violence and the machismo of a father who beat his mother, surface at all times. When asked if she is prepared for the attacks that will come from her political opponents, Gálvez replied that she was not afraid because “I had to face a very patriarchal, very macho culture, where women were not seen as a possibility for anything other than work,” and accused López Obrador of acting “moved by hate” and “macho attitudes”.

In the same way, he dismissed that his relationship with the opposition bloc could be used by his critics to point out that he has ties to sectors accused of corruption, and said that the ruling Morena party “does not represent honor” and “the president himself comes from the PRI.” “All the parties have valuable people, (and) they have people who are unfortunate.”

On the advantage that some of the pro-government candidates have, Gálvez downplayed it and maintained that “all my life has gone uphill.” “Some of the corcholatas (as official aspirants are identified in the country) do not transmit, they are not convinced. They are there because what they want is to continue doing the same as the president… they do not have their own identity, ”he added.

Speaking about the impact of Gálvez’s nomination, image consultant Víctor Gordoa, founding president of Grupo Imagen Pública, stated that the senator’s life story represents a “perfect dramatization of reality to enter the heart of the true people” of Mexico.

Gordoa believes that politics can also easily reach the middle class, and the upper classes who already see her as the “battering ram” that could wrest power from López Obrador’s party.

Because of her plain language, with bad words, some have come to compare her with Fox, but the analyst affirmed that there are no similarities between the two because the ex-president is more loquacious.

“Gálvez can easily take over López Obrador’s speech, take it out of his hands”the consultant said, acknowledging that there are similarities between the two politicians due to the use of simple language that easily reaches the people.

Source: AP