Mexico's fans celebrate victory of their team after the match against Germany.
From a seminaked candidate’s Tinder campaign to the heavy-metal rocker who said he wanted to be Mexico’s next president, here is a look at the lighter side of the country’s elections on Sunday July 1, which were won by the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Election con-Tinder
Striking suggestive poses in her underwear, Ana Sofia Orellana waged an unusual campaign for the legislature in the state of Puebla — on the dating app
Tinder.
Orellana took to the social network to target a sometimes hard-to-reach demographic: young men.
Her slogan: “Never has politics been so attractive.”
Gender benders
Fifteen men running for city council in the southern state of Oaxaca were disqualified when the electoral court ruled they were not transgender, as they claimed, but straight men trying to cheat gender quotas.
In Oaxaca, the Zapotec indigenous community traditionally considers gay or gender-nonconforming men a “third gender”.
“Muxes”, as they are known, typically wear women’s clothing and, under Mexico’s gender equity laws, are allowed to run for office as women.
But after a group of real muxes complained, the court ruled the 15 men’s candidacies were “a fraud”.
Rock the vote
Punk star Sergio Arau, a tattooed rocker with earrings and a mohawk, ran for president of Mexico — or so he would have the internet believe.
Arau mounted a parody campaign, complete with a campaign song written with his band, Heavy Mex.
In I Want to Be President Arau promised to make his friends rich, his relatives ministers and “fuck the people”.
The video had more than 55 000 views on YouTube.
Good girl
No one is owning up to writing another hit campaign song — a viral video called Good Girl in which an Audi-driving university student tells her bourgeois family she is voting for the leftist front-runner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, widely known as “Amlo”.
The video shows the striking young woman, identified as Almudena Ortiz Monasterio, grinding her hips in church as a priest raps, “Your vote is like your virginity, don’t give it to someone who stands for impunity” — a dig at the veteran leftist’s supposedly corrupt opponents.
But López Obrador’s party denounced the video, and no one admitted to being Ortiz Monasterio, whose social media accounts were created just before the song was uploaded.
Psychic power
Ortiz Monasterio got snubbed by one of Mexico’s leading psychics, Antonio Vazquez, better known as “El Brujo Mayor” (the Great Warlock).
Waving a staff shaped like the pre-Columbian serpent god Quetzalcoatl, Vazquez predicted that the front-runner would suffer an upset by ruling-party candidate José Antonio Meade.
Vazquez is not exactly known for his infallibility — in 2016, he predicted Donald Trump would lose the United States Republican primary election.
But he did correctly call another upset, predicting Mexico would defeat Germany 1-0 in their opening World Cup match.
World Cup exit
That match was the downfall of one candidate from López Obrador’s Morena party, who took smiling selfies from the stadium.
Juan Antonio Villarroel Garcia, who was running for mayor of the city of Atlixco, “abandoned his campaign responsibilities” by travelling to Russia for the tournament andthe party’s disciplinary committee stripped him of his candidacy. — AFP