Mexico elects first female president in US

Mexico City –

Mexico has elected its first female president — a U.S.-educated climate scientist and former mayor whose landslide victory on Sunday reflects the continued dominance of the country’s ruling party as well as major progress made by women in politics here.

It is no coincidence that Mexico will have a female leader before the United States and most other countries in the world.

For years Mexico has required political parties to ensure that all contestants in federal, state and municipal elections have at least 50% female candidates.

This has transformed politics: more than half of Congress members and nearly a third of governors are women, and women lead the Supreme Court and the ministries of the interior, education, economy, public security and foreign relations.

Political scientists say female leaders have helped advance some of Mexico’s most progressive policies, including a federal law that grants domestic workers social security rights and the decriminalization of abortion by several states, while the Supreme Court ruled last year that abortion must be allowed throughout the country.

Claudia Sheinbaum’s election shatters the last glass ceiling in politics in a country where women were barred from voting until 1954, and where a culture of gender discrimination and high rates of violence against women still prevail.

“In the 200 years of the Mexican Republic, I have become the first woman president,” Sheinbaum, 61, told supporters in her acceptance speech Sunday night, calling her win a victory for all women.

She said, “I have not come alone. We all have come.”

She will be sworn in on Oct. 1 and take charge of a prosperous but polarized nation plagued by widespread gang violence.

Sheinbaum has vowed to follow the path taken by outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist widely known as AMLO who helped reduce poverty by doubling the minimum wage and expanding the country’s welfare system while granting extraordinary new powers to the military and failing to curb cartel violence.

She supports some of his most divisive proposals, including a series of constitutional changes that critics worry would erode democratic checks and balances.

His extraordinary victory — he won more than twice as many votes as his main rival — was largely seen as a vote of confidence in López Obrador and his establishment party, Morena.

But how Sheinbaum will deal with his long shadow is the central question of his presidency. López Obrador has vowed to retire from politics, but many wonder if he will be able to find a way to stay in the fight that has animated his entire adult life.

At the same time, Sheinbaum has rejected the idea that she would be a puppet of the former president and that this is gender discrimination. She said in an interview, “This reflects misogyny and machismo.”

Veteran Mexican journalist Jorge Zepeda Patterson said Sheinbaum faces several challenges.

“Generals, union leaders, party leaders, managers of business chambers … are not only men, but they operate with culturally patriarchal codes,” he wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Sheinbaum’s political career was made possible thanks to López Obrador, who was then mayor of Mexico City, when he plucked the then-university professor out of academic anonymity and appointed him his environment secretary.

He subsequently encouraged a sustained election effort that elevated Sheinbaum to his former position as mayor of the capital, and now to his successor as president.

In Sheinbaum’s campaign speeches, she refers to her teacher as Mexico’s “greatest president.” She borrows his slogan, promising to “put the poor first.”

Leila Abed, acting director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, said “it’s hard to believe” that López Obrador would stay away from politics altogether. “But he would probably allow that to happen. [Sheinbaum] To clarify our stand on some issues.”

One is energy policy. López Obrador has invested billions of dollars in refinery projects and propping up state-run oil giant Pemex.

When asked how his policies might be different, Sheinbaum inevitably cited his scientific background, which includes a doctorate in environmental engineering and four years of study at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

“I’m a scientist, I’ve always worked for renewable sources of energy,” she said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last year. “I’m a woman. I believe in scientific development as part of national progress.”

His devotion to science was evident from the early days of the pandemic, when López Obrador defied social distancing recommendations and toured the country — shaking hands with fans, hugging and kissing supporters and urging his countrymen to keep eating in restaurants.

Sheinbaum, who was Mexico City’s mayor at the time, was one of several people credited with working behind the scenes to convince the president to change his stance and wear a mask and take more precautions.

“He urged people to wear masks, he closed down the city and supported social distancing, while AMLO was saying the opposite,” Abed said.

Experts said Sheinbaum would likely take a more outspoken stance than her predecessor on gender issues — an area that activists have often accused López Obrador of neglecting.

Her criticism often extended to Sheinbaum, although he spoke out against violence against women and the appalling statistic that on average 10 women are killed every day.

In 2022, he pushed for the arrest and prosecution of the alleged killers in one of the country’s most high-profile cases: the murder of Ariadna Fernanda López Ruiz, whose mutilated body was found dumped on a highway outside the capital. Sheinbaum alleged a cover-up on the part of the state prosecutor, who was later charged in the case.

Preliminary results show Sheinbaum won more votes than any candidate in decades.

As of Monday afternoon, she was winning with 59% of the vote, while her closest rival, former senator Xochitl Gálvez Ruiz, had 28%, running on the ticket of a coalition of opposition parties largely united against López Obrador.

With two women front-runners for the presidency, it has been clear for months that Mexico would elect a female president.

Many credited the work of activists that led to the implementation of gender quotas, an effort that has been underway since the country’s advent of democracy.

After more than seven decades of dominance by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, politicians began rewriting laws to make elections more fair in the 1990s. Feminist activists saw an opportunity.

Lawmakers first set a mandatory 30% quota for women candidates for the 2003 elections and later increased it to 40% for the 2009 elections.

For a while, parties tried to evade the requirements, running women in losing districts or making secret agreements so that female candidates would resign after being elected and hand over their positions to men.

In response, women politicians from different ideologies formed a coalition to push back the movement., Taking parties to court and pressuring election officials to strengthen quota rules.

Less than a third of United Nations member states have ever had a female leader, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

Jennifer Piscopo, a professor of gender and politics at the University of London who studies Mexico, said her research shows that the presence of women in office shapes not just policy but also culture.

“Even if all forms of gender inequality are not resolved, I think what matters is that there will no longer be a little girl in Mexico who thinks a woman cannot be president,” she said.

Cecilia Sanchez Vidal of The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.