Do we like them?

Do we like Xóchitl Gálvez?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record on LGBTQ+ and women's rights and a rags-to-Senate story, marked down for dodging abortion during the campaign and backing fracking.

Xóchitl Gálvez grew up poor in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, selling homemade sweets to help her family. She has spoken of an alcoholic father and a violent home. Her father was Otomi and her mother mixed-race, and she left town at 17. It's the kind of start that makes her pitch as a woman of the people land.

She studied computer engineering at UNAM on a scholarship and built tech companies. Vicente Fox then put her in charge of indigenous peoples' policy, and she was the first director of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples. She lost bids for governor of Hidalgo and the Senate, then won the Miguel Hidalgo borough in Mexico City in 2015 and became a senator in 2018.

Her fight with the then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador made her a national name. Her fiercest line aimed at him was “Machos like you are afraid of an independent and intelligent woman.” That cheeky fire, plus a public identity as an indigenous woman who made it, took her to the 2024 coalition ticket against Sheinbaum, where she lost by a long way.

On the harm test, she comes out well for a candidate of a conservative party. The Wilson Center says she backs LGBTQ+ rights and abortion despite the PAN's reputation, and Buenos Aires Times describes her as a defender of both. The mark against her is that, as the coalition's figurehead in 2023, she moved from backing abortion to saying she respected different views. Morena's Citlalli Hernández called her a “feminista de ocasión” for it, and that's a political attack, so judge it yourself.

On the planet side it's mixed. In April 2026 she backed Sheinbaum's opening to fracking, calling it necessary. The same report says she acknowledged fracking pollutes, but she argued that newer equipment can cut the impact. Some will read that as pragmatic energy security and others as a step backwards on climate.

The good stuff is a career spent on indigenous affairs and a rise from real poverty. She has also shown she'll praise a rival when it's earned: in April 2026 she said an opposition should flag the government's errors but also recognise its successes. She's stayed an active critic since leaving the Senate, with a long interview in Letras Libres in August 2026 on the corruption she says the president still has to tackle.