President Carlita Ruiz is scheduled to leave office in 2023, ending her term of office after twelve years. She is not seeking a third term as President of the Republic, so her ruling Socialist Party has nominated Senator Daniel Serrano as her successor as Chairman of the Party and nominee for the Presidency in this electoral contest. Serrano is forty-five years old, openly gay, and is married to Luis Corrales, the leading matador in all of Garza. Serrano is a former Mayor of Ciudad Garza (Garza City) and a former judge as well as professor of criminal law at the University of Ciudad Garza. He supports expanding the social safety net even further, imposing higher taxes on those corporations deemed the "worst offenders of wage theft" to pay for more wage subsidies, and increasing labor rights as well as achieving a constitutional amendment to "guarantee and enshrine marriage equality, abortion rights, and other civil liberties in the supreme law of the land."
Serrano's chief opponent is former President Marco Roman, age 60, a family man and devout Catholic who has been in political semi-retirement until lately, but now seeks to "course correct some of the excesses of the recent administration" of President Carlita Ruiz, who has overseen dramatic policy and legislative shifts toward socialism, queer liberation, abortion rights, labor legislation. Roman's Catholic Action party is centrist on economics, though more right-leaning on social issues. He is expected to present more of a challenge to Serrano than is the third choice: Senator Hernan Duarte, age fifty-one, the candidate of the more socially liberal, economically centrist Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP has a small, niche base in the urban areas, mostly among the professional, managerial class as well as academia, but is very weak traditionally outside of those two main categories.
Serrano and Roman are expected to compete mostly for the peasant vote, while Serrano will likely do very well among the urban working class and Roman decently well among the middle class, competing somewhat with Duarte. Since the peasants traditionally are very pious, they are Roman's best chance for victory, whereas their economic interests are better aligned with the increasingly militant Socialist Party. Roman is hoping that lingering anti-gay and anti-abortion sentiments among the devout Roman Catholic elements will offset less popular stances on bread and butter issues and is carefully avoiding any kind of austerity talk that might undercut him. His rhetoric is more one of limiting new social programs, not rolling back older ones, and of "making sinners pay the bill" with excises on various "vices," such as marijuana, alcohol, and tobacco. Duarte is using a rare populist argument for a Liberal Democrat to attack Roman, by claiming that the tobacco tax actually hits the poor hardest and calling for its reduction as well as lower business taxes for small business, seeking to appeal to merchants and lower diesel taxes to entice truckers.
Election Day is Monday, 25 July, 2022.
Which way should Garza go?
Senator Daniel Serrano (Socialist)
Senator Hernan Duarte (Liberal Democratic)
Former President Marco Roman (Catholic Action)
In the event of no clear majority for any one candidate, the Cortes (parliament) will decide the election by a simple majority of a joint-session of both the Senate and National Assembly.
