Mexican presidential candidate Xochitl Galvez readies for a must-win debate

Political analysts have also questioned whether Galvez has enough experience to develop a political strategy, while Sheinbaum has the gravitas of having led Mexico City as mayor.

Galvez, a businesswoman who has stressed her Indigenous and working-class background, struggled since early in the campaign to win the unequivocal support of the different parties that form the opposition coalition, whose players are the Revolutionary Institutional Party, known as the PRI, and the National Action Party, known as the PAN, plus the smaller PRD.

She has sought to depict herself as officially unaffiliated with any party, to ward off criticism of their performance when in power in the 2000s and early 2010s, prior to Lopez Obrador’s landslide election in 2018.

She was never “the candidate that had the presence of a statesperson, and you can’t change that,” said Alejandro Schtulmann, the head of the analysis firm EMPRA. “She lacked the structure of a party. She’s had to be friendly with the people of the PRI, get together with people of the PRD, and even in the PAN they don’t love her a great deal.”

Yet one of Galvez’s top advisers, former Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo, said Galvez is the best candidate to attract foreign investment into Mexico.

In an event this week in Mexico City hosted by Bloomberg, Guajardo also provided a potential preview of Galvez’s line of attack during the debate. He told the market-savvy crowd that she is better equipped to address infrastructure shortcomings that may discourage companies seeking to relocate closer to the U.S. market from choosing Mexico.

“We could have a mechanism to rescue, to invest in, what is the main bottleneck for development of industrial parks, which is the energy supply and infrastructure,” he said. Of Galvez, he added, “she’s a woman of pragmatic solutions. She does not have ideology that will prevent her from making the decisions that will most benefit Mexicans.”

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(Carolina Millan contributed to this story.)