2023 assessment and 2024 outlook in the United States and Mexico

The correspondents’ club is interested in the events that marked the year 2023 and the issues that will occupy the year 2024 in Washington and Mexico.

At the end of 2023, the time for taking stock is approaching. We are going to the United Kingdom and Germany to find out what characterized the year that is ending and to find out what will be at the center of concerns in 2024. In the United States, as in Mexico, 2024 will be an election year.

United States: a new Trump-Biden duel?

The year 2023 will have drawn the contours of the same duel as in 2020, since according to the polls, the Republican billionaire Donald Trump and the Democratic outgoing Joe Biden are in the lead. And the 45th president is ahead of the 46th in opinion polls. And Donald Trump is well ahead of his Republican opponents for the primary.

Donald Trump, throughout the last few months, has gained ground over his challengers. And first of all on the one who was expected as the possible alternative to a new candidacy of the former president: the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis. Except that the one who was largely re-elected in November 2022 in his state does not print at the national level. He is left behind by Donald Trump, but he is now even losing ground in certain polls over Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump presidency. The election of November 5, 2024 could therefore well be a repeat of that of four years ago.

The campaign is still long, but if it is indeed a Biden-Trump match, we already have some ideas of the billionaire’s program. Some even speak of a dictatorship and he does not deny it. He promises to purge the state apparatus and make his political adversaries pay, notably at the Department of Justice, who are responsible, according to him, for his legal troubles. Four criminal trials await him, with potential prison sentences. Some of these trials will take place in the middle of the presidential campaign.

For Joe Biden too, a procedure will not be far away, since Congress has officially opened the impeachment procedure for the current president. Congress accuses him of helping his son Hunter’s business when he was Obama’s vice president. This procedure has almost no chance of succeeding since the Democrats have a majority in the Senate. But it’s a thorn in Joe Biden’s side, especially since his son is also facing two charges. 2024 will be an election and legal year in the United States.

Mexico: two women vying for the presidency

Two women will be the two main candidates in the presidential election on June 4, 2024, with the assurance that the presidency will be occupied by a woman for the very first time in this country. In the meantime, the year 2023 has been marked by several migration and security crises.

First of all, the migration crisis at the border with the United States with record arrivals of migrants, nearly three million people arrested in 2023 while crossing this border illegally. This migration crisis leads to constant pressure from the US government on Mexico to contain these movements of people and prevent them from reaching the border. The year began with a visit by Joe Biden to Mexico at the beginning of January and it ended with a meeting, on December 27, in Mexico, of the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken with President López Obrador to implore his help.

The year 2023 was also a dark year in Mexico because cartel violence was unleashed against the population, with an increase in massacres which deeply shocked Mexicans. In December, 14 villagers were killed while trying to resist extortion attempts by a cartel and a few days before Christmas, eleven young people were massacred during a party in the Guanajuato region, in the central Mexico. Killings which outrage the Mexicans but which provoke practically no reaction from the authorities.

The year 2024 will see President López Obrador’s six-year term come to an end and it has become a ubiquitous topic in public debates. First, because President López Obrador is rushing to inaugurate the major infrastructure projects that he had promised to complete before the end of his mandate to revive economic development in the south of the country. Notably, there are two new railway lines: the Mayan Train, which transports tourists and goods across the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Train, which connects the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico. .

But if the electoral atmosphere is felt, it is above all because the campaign started very early, almost a year before the election, with the nomination, at the end of the summer, of two women as candidates. to the presidency. Claudia Sheinbaum on the left, the former mayor of Mexico City, is favored to succeed López Obrador. And opposite her, Senator Xochitl Gálvez is at the head of a coalition of all the other parties, from left to right, who are united against the hegemony of Morena, the president’s party. In 2024, Mexico will therefore elect a woman as president for the first time in its history.