Mexican Federal Elections

The Federal elections in Mexico will take place on July 1st, 2018. During said elections, Mexicans will vote for their President, 128 Senators and 500 members of the Lower Chamber. They will also elect Governors and members of the local congresses for Guanajuato, Veracruz, Tabasco, Yucatan, Chiapas, Jalisco, Puebla, Morelos and Mexico City.
And in Mexico City, not only are they going to elect the Governor but also the members of its legislature along with 16 mayors. The people who are elected as mayors will take the place of the heads of each of the former delegations in which the city was divided; this in accordance to the new Constitution for Mexico City, which was approved in 2017.
According to data provided by the Instituto Nacional Electoral (Federal Elections Institute – INE), the electoral authority in charge of organizing, monitoring and verifying the elections, over 87 million Mexicans are registered to vote. The INE also informs that the number of Mexicans who currently live outside of Mexico and who have a right to vote in these elections is roughly half a million. Nevertheless, only a little over 25,000 people have registered to vote.
The Presidential candidates are:
Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador for the alliance between Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (National Renovation Movement – MORENA), Partido Humanista Encuentro Social (National Meeting Party – PES) and the Partido del Trabajo (Workers Party – PT). This is the second time that Lopez Obrador, from the State of Tabasco, is running for President. Political commentators place him on the left, while others point to him being a populist candidate. In 2006 he lost to PAN candidate Felipe Calderon by only .56 percent. Many of his followers said there had been an electoral fraud, but a quick vote count confirmed the original results. Nevertheless, for a long time the PRD, which at the time was the political party that had supported Obrador as its Presidential candidate, and his followers continued to argue that they had won the election. This time around, Jose Antonio Meade will be the candidate for the alliance between the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party – PRI), Partido Nueva Alianza (New Alliance Party  – PANAL) and the Partido Verde Ecologista de México (Mexican Green Party – PVEM). Ricardo Anaya is leading the Alliance between the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party – PAN), Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Revolutionary Democratic Party – PRD), and Movimiento Ciudadano (Citizens Movement – MC).
Along with the aforementioned candidates, there are another 38 independent candidates in the run. Among the group, we must highlight Margarita Zavala and Jaime Rodriguez Calderon, known as “El Bronco,” who is the Governor of Nuevo Leon but is currently on leave to be able to run for President. Zavala is the wife of former President Calderon, and after being rejected by the PAN as their candidate, she decided to run as an independent. Another of the independent candidates is Pedro Kumamoto from Jalisco –also known as Kuma – who is only 28 years old, and who back in 2015 was elected into the local Congress in Jalisco on a campaign promoted almost entirely through social media.
But the independent candidate that definitely catches everyone’s attention MariChuy – this is the nickname for Maria de Jesus Patricio Martinez. She is the candidate of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (Zapatista Liberation Army  – EZLN) and of the Consejo Nacional Indígena (National Indigenous Council – CNI). MaryChuy is a Mexican native from Nahuatl de Tuxpan, Jalisco. MaryChuy has been a medicine woman, herbalist and a practitioner of natural medicine. She also versed in homeopathy and iridology. Back in 1992, she started a doctor’s office in traditional medicine and in 1997 she started a new one under the Unit for the Treatment of Indigenous Communities of the University of Guadalajara. There is also a school where Nahuatl is taught along with herbalism, and there is also a historical record of traditional medicine. MaryChuy is an activist, an advocate of the rigths of indigenous people, and a member of the EZLN.