When Mexican voters go to the polls on 1 July to pick a new president, they will able to choose between candidates including Richie Rich, Alligatorfish, and the Untamed One thanks to a ruling by the country’s electoral institute.
Voters will now be allowed to scribble a candidate’s nickname, initials or campaign slogan anywhere on the ballot – rather than mark an X over their names – and have it count as valid.
The National Electoral Institute (INE) – which organises the election and referees all partisan political activities in Mexico – changed the rules barely three weeks ahead of the vote that will also renew congress, elect nine governors and hundreds of mayors.
Nicknames abound in Mexican politics: the current front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador is often referred to by his initials: “Amlo”. But he is equally well-known as “El Peje” for pejelegarto, a fish from his native Tabasco state, whose name translates literally as Alligatorfish.
His closest rival – Ricardo Anaya Cortés of the rightwing National Action Party – is sometimes referred to as “RAC” in print, but on social media he is increasingly called Ricky Riquín Canallín – the Spanish equivalent of “Richie Rich”, which was coined by López Obrador in a recent candidates’ debate.
The lone independent candidate on the ballot, cowboy-turned-governor Jaime Rodríguez, is better known as “El Bronco” – or the Untamed One.
The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate José Antonio Meade, whose sedate speaking style and lacklustre campaign has failed to capture the public imagination, lacks a nickname, beyond the perfunctory “Pepe” or “Pepe Toño” – the diminutive form of his first names.
Dissenters on the INE board warned that allowing voters to use nicknames could cause confusion during the vote count. A blank box on the ballot already allows for write-in candidates.
López Obrador has a history of tagging his critics with unflattering nicknames. As Mexico City mayor, he called anti-crime protesters pirruris (spoiled rich kids) and dismissed civil society organisations which disagreed with him as fifis (posh).
López Obrador labelled Anaya with the “Ricky Riquín Canallín” during the second presidential debate. The name stuck and remained the debate’s most memorable moment.
“It shows how good López Obrador is at branding people,” said Federico Estévez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “He’s almost as good as Trump.”
All polls show López Obrador ahead of his rivals by around 20 percentage points, amid a broad desire for change in a country beset by drug cartel violence and political corruption scandals.
