Mexico elects Claudia Sheinbaum as its first woman President

AP

Mexico City, Jun 3

Mexico’s projected presidential winner Claudia Sheinbaum will become the first woman President in the country’s 200-year history.

The climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor said on Sunday night that her two competitors had called and conceded victory.

“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said with a smile, speaking at a downtown hotel shortly after electoral authorities announced a statistical sample showed she held an irreversible lead.

“I don’t make it alone. We’ve all made it, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, daughters and granddaughters.”      

“We have demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections,” she said.

The National Electoral Institute’s President said Sheinbaum had between 58.3 per cent and 60.7 per cent of the votes, according to a statistical sample. Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez had between 26.6 per cent and 28.6 per cent of the votes and Jorge Álvarez Máynez had between 9.9 per cent and 10.8 per cent of the votes.

The preliminary count, which started off very slowly, put Sheinbaum 27 points ahead of Gálvez with 42 per cent of polling place tallies counted shortly after her victory speech.

The governing party candidate campaigned on continuing the political course set over the last six years by her political mentor President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

His anointed successor, the 61-year-old Sheinbaum led the campaign wire-to-wire despite a spirited challenge from Gálvez. This was the first time in Mexico that the two main opponents were women.

“Of course, I congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum with all my respect who ended up the winner by a wide margin,” López Obrador said shortly after electoral authority’s announcement. “She is going to be Mexico’s first woman president in 200 years.” 

If the margin holds, it would approach his landslide victory in 2018. López Obrador won the presidency after two unsuccessful tries with 53.2 per cent of the votes, in a three-way race where National Action took 22.3 per cent and the Institutional Revolutionary Party took 16.5 per cent.

Earlier, Gálvez wrote on the social platform X, ‘The votes are there. Don’t let them hide them.’

Sheinbaum is unlikely to enjoy the kind of unquestioning devotion that López Obrador has enjoyed. Both belong to the governing Morena party.

In Mexico City’s main colonial-era main plaza, the Zocalo, Sheinbaum’s lead did not initially draw the kind of cheering and jubilant crowds that greeted López Obrador’s victory in 2018.

Fernando Fernández, a chef, 28, joined the relatively small crowd, hoping for a Sheinbaum victory, but even he acknowledged there were problems.

“You vote for Claudia out of conviction, for AMLO,” Fernández said, referring to López Obrador by his initials, as most Mexicans do. But his highest hope is that Sheinbaum can “improve what AMLO couldn’t do, the price of gasoline, crime and drug trafficking, which he didn’t combat even though he had the power.”  

Also in the crowd, Itxel Robledo, 28, a business administrator, expressed hope that Sheinbaum would do what López Obrador didn’t. “What Claudia has to do is put professionals in every area.”     

Elsewhere in the city, Yoselin Ramírez, 29, said she voted for Sheinbaum, but split her vote for other posts because she didn’t want anyone holding a strong majority.

“I don’t want everything to be occupied by the same party, so there can be a little more equality,” she said without elaborating.

The main opposition candidate, Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur and former senator, tried to seize on Mexicans’ concerns about security and promised to take a more aggressive approach toward organized crime.

Nearly 100 million people were registered to vote, but turnout appeared to be slightly lower than in past elections. Voters were also electing governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, and choosing candidates for both houses of Congress, thousands of mayorships and other local posts, in the biggest elections the nation has seen and ones that have been marked by violence.

The elections were widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress. Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.

Sheinbaum promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.

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