Latin America’s second-largest economy appeared poised to elect a silver-haired, baseball-loving leftist as its next president on Sunday, as 89 million Mexicans headed to the polls.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the 64-year-old leader of the Movement for National Regeneration or Morena party, has cast the vote as an epoch-making opportunity to radically transform Mexico by electing a leader who will rid the country of corruption and rule for the 53 million Mexicans still stuck in poverty.

“This is a historic day,” López Obrador, who is better known as Amlo, told reporters as he arrived at a Mexico City polling station to vote early on Sunday morning. “More than an election it will be a referendum, a plebiscite in which people will choose between more of the same or genuine change.”



Amlo has tried – and failed – to become Mexico’s president twice before, in 2006 and 2012, but his decision to make the fight against corruption the bedrock of his third presidential campaign appears to have paid off. Pre-ballot polls suggested the former Mexico City mayor would trounce rivals from the National Action party (Pan) and the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), the only two parties to have controlled Mexico’s presidency since the late 1920s, by at least a 20-point margin.



Speaking as she prepared to vote at a polling station in Mexico City’s Nápoles neighbourhood, civil servant Evelyn Correa said she was backing Amlo because she was tired of the corruption and “shamelessness” of Mexico’s political elite. “They know nothing will happen to them and the few politicians that are caught are just scapegoats,” the 44-year-old complained.



“He won’t resolve everything like he promises,” Correa added of Amlo. “But we’ve tried the [other parties]. Hopefully he’s different.”



Manuel Molina, a 34-year-old advertising worker who was voting in the Tacubaya neighbourhood, said: “This country is in a deep hole and he’s the only one that can pull us out of it.”

Experts say Amlo’s success is largely the result his ability to tap into public rage at political sleaze and soaring levels of violence and present himself as an anti-establishment saviour set on fixing those problems.



Mexico’s unpopular outgoing president, Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, vowed to halve Mexico’s murder rate when he was elected six years ago but leaves office with the country on track for its most violent year in modern history, with more than 13,000 homicides already in 2018. In a recent article about the effect the security crisis had on the presidential race, security analyst Eduardo Guerrero wrote: “It’s the violence, stupid.”

A record 130 politicians have been murdered since last September when the election campaign – which will also see nine governors, 128 senators, 500 lower house congresspeople and thousands of regional legislators selected – began.



“I deeply regret the loss of life during the course of the elections,” the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, an Amlo friend, tweeted on Saturday. “I hope that democracy, justice and human rights prevail in memory of the deceased candidates.”

Peña Nieto’s administration has also been blighted by a series of headline-grabbing corruption scandals, including an outcry over a luxury $7m mansion his wife purchased from a government contractor.

At one recent rally on the impoverished outskirts of Mexico’s capital, Amlo railed against what he calls Mexico’s “power mafia” and vowed that once sworn in as president, on 1 December, he would no longer tolerate politicians who made gangsters look like “babes in arms” or saw public office as a golden ticket to personal enrichment.

“He’s a populist, this Andrés Manuel, isn’t that right? Messianic!” Amlo sneered, mocking critics who have dubbed him Mexico’s “tropical messiah” and compared him to US president Donald Trump or even Brazil’s rightwing populist Jair Bolsonaro. “I couldn’t care less about this,” Amlo insisted.



Election results were not expected until late on Sunday night but Benjamín Moya García, a rural worker from Xochimilco, said he was convinced Amlo had it in the bag.

“We’re not probably going to win – we are going to win,” the 59-year-old celebrated, predicting: “Things will be totally different without corruption. I hope he doesn’t fail us.”

Elena Hernández Guerrero, a 35-year-old fashion designer, had already started referring to Amlo as “mi presidente”: “He’s with the people, the poor. The others only care about the rich,” she said. “It’s just like he says: the ‘power mafia’ is on top and they won’t let the rest of us rise us. He will end all this.”

Delfina Gómez, a leading Morena politician who is running for a senate seat, told the Guardian she believed corruption-weary voters would choose Amlo and his party because they were thirsting for “a radical transformation in the way politics is done, and in politicians themselves”. “We are [ordinary] citizens. We’re not Martians. We’re not from the other side,” she said of Morena.



Gómez described Mexico’s likely next president as a thrifty, upstanding man who would lead “a government of austerity and honesty”: “He finds it shameful that someone might be flaunting their wealth while others are dying of hunger.”

But Gómez admitted ridding Mexico – which languishes in 135th place in Transparency International’s corruption perception index – of corruption, as Amlo has repeatedly promised, would not be easy and would require the full participation of society.



“Of course it is a process … we don’t know if it will take six years, or 12. But we must make a start,” Gómez said.