Climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico’s first female President in Mexico’s history.
Preliminary results from the INE electoral authority showed Sheinbaum leading her main opposition rival, Xochitl Galvez, by about 60% to 28%.
“I’m emotional and I feel grateful,” said the 61-year-old, who will also make history as the first president of Jewish heritage to lead the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country. And I won’t let you down.”
“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum announced at a downtown hotel after her two competitors called her to concede her victory.
“I don’t make it alone. We’ve all made it, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters” Sheinbaum added.
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 Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez.
This was the first time in Mexico that the two main opponents were women.
Election day in Mexico was marked by violence as town council candidate Israel Delgado was shot dead by two hitmen aboard a motorcycle in the township of Cuitzeo.
Residents voted under a heavy police guard — but later passed by the home of murdered candidate Israel Delgado to light a candle for the well-known local politician at an improvised altar on his doorstep.
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 mayors and other local posts, in the biggest elections the nation has seen.
Sheinbaum has promised to continue the policies of her predecessor, López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a programme that pays youths to become apprentices.
Her main opponent, Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur and former senator, attempted to seize on Mexicans’ concerns about security, promising to take a more aggressive approach to organised crime.
The elections were widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, who has largely failed to bring down gun 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 re-election.
About 27 candidates — mostly running for mayor or town councils — have been killed so far this year. The election has seen an unprecedented number of mass shootings as criminals target whole campaign events with gunfire.
Persistent cartel violence and Mexico’s economy were primary issues on voters’ minds.
Sheinbaum now faces the task of forging her own path, including the delicate balancing act of advancing the leftist Lopez Obrador’s state-centric economic polices, especially over natural resources such as oil and minerals, while also making progress on issues seen as his weak points like the environment and crime.
The standard-bearer of the ruling MORENA party will also face a ballooning budget deficit, complicating her own spending plans.
Sheinbaum’s triumph caps an unlikely four-decade climb that has taken the daughter of activist academics to the pinnacle of power in the Spanish-speaking world’s most populous nation, for decades known as a socially conservative bastion with a macho culture.
Mexico City’s packed Zocalo square welcomed its country’s new leader Claudia Sheinbaum on Sunday.
“It took way too many years to get here,” said Francisco Labastida, a veteran Mexican politician with the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who was the presidential runner-up in 2000.
Labastida said he was especially proud that Mexico had achieved the feat before its northern neighbor, the United States, which has never had a woman president.
Sheinbaum’s ability to separate herself from Lopez Obrador once she takes office in October is “the great unknown,” added Labastida, since the famously stubborn leader would likely try to impose his own vision despite his pledge to retire to his ranch in tropical southern Mexico.
The makeup of the new Congress will also be crucial, with MORENA and its allies securing a two-thirds majority in the lower house, while their seats in the Senate appear to be just shy of the threshold needed to amend the constitution unopposed, according to the latest INE results.
Both Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador have proposed controversial reforms, such as a possible overhaul to the judiciary with Supreme Court judges elected by popular vote, which would require a two-thirds majority to enact.
