The ruling Morena party has a commanding lead in the polls six weeks before voters will elect 500 deputies to sit in the lower house of the federal Congress.

Results of polls conducted between December 1 last year and April 23 and collated by the newspaper El País show that 46.9% of voters intend to cast their ballots for Morena, the party founded by President López Obrador that swept to power in the 2018 elections.

A “poll of polls” collated by the website Oraculus shows a similar result: 44% of respondents intend to vote for Morena, which currently has a slim majority in the Chamber of Deputies on its own and a two-thirds majority with its allies.

The El País analysis and the poll of polls both show that Morena has more than twice the support of the two main opposition parties, the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

According to the newspaper, 17% of voters will vote for the conservative PAN and 16.5% will support the PRI, which held office between 2012 and 2018. Only 4.2% of poll respondents will vote for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), while the Ecological Green Party (PVEM), the Citizens Movement (MC) and the Labor Party (PT) will attract the support of 3.8%, 3.1% and 3% of voters, respectively.

The PVEM and the PT are Morena party allies. The three parties together will attract the support of 53.7% of voters at the June 6 elections, according to El País.

Oraculus, which collated the results of 67 polls, predicts that the Morena-PVEM-PT alliance will win 337 of the 500 lower house seats, 300 of which are elected directly and 200 by proportional representation.

The PAN, the PRI and the PRD have formed their own alliance to contest the elections. According to El País, the three-party alliance will attract the combined support of 37.3% of voters. Oraculus predicts that the coalition will win 152 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the other 11 seats will go to the Citizens Movement party, which currently has 25 federal deputies.

Oraculus’s poll also shows that López Obrador currently has an approval rating of 63%. He has maintained a high approval rating despite widespread criticism of the government’s management of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 300,000 lives in Mexico, a sharp economic slump in 2020 and the failure to combat high levels of violence, including homicides and femicides.

Among López Obrador’s four most recent predecessors, only Felipe Calderón, who represented the PAN between 2006 and 2012, had a higher approval rating after 28 months in office. Calderón’s rating two years and four months after he was sworn in as president was 67%, according to Oraculus.

Vicente Fox, who held office for the PAN between 2000 and 2006, was the third most popular president after 28 months in office with an approval rating of 58%.

Ernesto Zedillo, who held office for the PRI between 1994 and 2000, had a 54% approval rating after 28 months while Enrique Peña Nieto, who also represented the PRI, only had 41% support in April 2015, seven months after the disappearance of the 43 teaching students in Guerrero, a crime that significantly hurt the popularity of the then-president and his government.

The strong standing of Morena and López Obrador in the polls is likely to instill confidence not only in the party’s candidates for deputy but also in at least some of its contenders for thousands of municipal and state positions. In addition to renewing the lower house of federal Congress, voters will elect councilors, mayors, state representatives and governors in 15 states on June 6.

According to the results of a survey conducted by the polling company Massive Caller, Morena is ahead in the gubernatorial races in nine states: Baja California, Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nayarit, Sinaloa, Sonora, Tlaxcala and Zacatecas.

In two of those states, Guerrero and Michoacán, the party doesn’t currently have a candidate for governor because the two men it put forward were stripped of their candidacies for failing to report precampaign expenses.

The other states where voters will elect new governors this year are Baja California Sur, Campeche, Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Querétaro and San Luis Potosí.

Morena currently holds the governorships of five states — Baja California, Chiapas, Puebla, Tabasco and Veracruz — and is also in power in Mexico City, where the government is led by Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.

The PRI is in power in 12 states and the PAN holds office in nine. Quintana Roo and Michoacán have PRD governments, the MC is in office in Jalisco, and the Solidary Encounter Party — a Morena ally — holds power in Morelos.  Independent governor Jaime Rodríguez, who contested the 2018 presidential election, heads Nuevo León.

Source: El País (sp), Forbes México (sp)