State elections: Coahuila and EdoMex, the last stretch.

1. This Sunday, we will see the last two electoral contests before next year’s presidential election. The country’s most populous state, Estado de Mexico, will elect a new governor. Whilst Coahuila, in Northern Mexico, will elect both a new governor and a new state legislature. These are the last two states where the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has never lost a gubernatorial election.
2. Where are we? Coahuila will likely stay under the PRI’s control. The PRI-PAN-PRD alliance Va por Mexico nominated Manolo Jimenez: a traditionally príista candidate, close to the incumbent governor and deemed to have had a solid tenure as municipal president of the state’s capital, Saltillo.
3. After a fiercely contested internal process, MORENA nominated Senator Armando Guadiana, the folksy coal businessman who is close to President López Obrador. Along the way, the party and its coalition imploded. Both Ricardo Mejia, the aggrieved runner-up who was undersecretary of public security in the AMLO administration, and the Labor Party (PT) broke with MORENA and launched their own candidacy. This break in the ruling coalition, has divided the vote in favour of the PRI and Jimenez.
4. Over the last few days, the national leaderships of both the PT and the Green Party, who had nominated their own candidates, announced their decision to support MORENA’s Guadiana. Only to be refuted by their state leaderships, and the candidates themselves, when they refused to step down from the race. A reminder of the fluid nature of alliances in highly competitive races, but also the importance of local leaderships in an increasingly fragmented political landscape.
5. The race in Estado de Mexico is anything but even. With anywhere between 10–15 points ahead in the polls, MORENA’s candidate and former Education Secretary Delfina Gomez will most likely be the next governor of the second most important constituency in the country, after Mexico City. Gomez is riding on the popularity wave of president AMLO, possibly because of the electorate’s predominant composition of lower-income urban families that have been disproportionately benefited from this administration’s social programmes.
6. What does it mean? For MORENA, a victory in EDOMEX will further its already good chances of winning the 2024 presidential election. The broad coalition will hold 21 of 32 governorships as well as the presidency. The opposition, in turn, will have to recalibrate their strategy if they expect to regain some public offices or, at the very least, stop MORENA from obtaining an absolute majority in Congress in 2024.
7. Geographically, Morena and AMLO struggle the most in Northern states, where they were unable to win the governorships of Nuevo León, Chihuahua, and seemingly Coahuila. Even in Tamaulipas, Sonora or the Bajas, states where Morena won, AMLO’s party cannot take popular support for granted.
8. The once all-powerful PRI will be down to only two governorships and continue a seemingly unstoppable decline into irrelevance, even if they retain Coahuila. Many wonder whether this is the end of the party as a national force, less than a decade after they won the presidency and left it with the most unpopular president on record. If the PRI is not able to win Estado de Mexico this weekend, nobody should be surprised that the force dominating the 2024 Va por Mexico will be the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
9. Ahead of 2024, these two elections provide two scenarios for what may happen next year: the ability of Morena’s leadership to nominate a presidential candidate without breaking the party will be the key to its success. If Morena arrives to 2024’s presidential election with a candidate supported by the whole party and its leadership, he/she will likely win it by a comfortable margin, independent of who the candidate and its rivals are. If the coalition fragments over the nomination process, we could see a scenario much closer to Coahuila, a tighter competition where Morena will struggle to win a congressional majority.
10. What about business? Coahuila’s neighborhood with Nuevo León on the Mexican side and Texas on the United States front, make the state a natural beneficiary of the nearshoring boom that Mexico is currently experiencing. If, as we expect, the PRI continues to govern Coahuila, the state will likely sustain its fairly tranquil border with the United States with little criminal violence, compared to nearby states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, in benefit of industrial activity.
11. Estado de México is the industrial hub of Mexico City and a key state on its own, due to its size and economy. Whilst quite far from the border with the United States, Estado de Mexico has attracted a very significant amount of foreign direct investment, mainly from Mexico’s North American partners.
12. A political alternation in a governorship that has been controlled by the same party for the better part of the past century raises concerns among industrialists. However, the recentexperience of such alternations from the PRI to Morena shows that the two parties often negotiate towards graceful transitions. We expect this to be the case yet again, given the smooth relationship between the outgoing Governor Alfredo Del Mazo and President López Obrador.

Authors:

Mauricio A Castañeda & Gonzalo Escribano