How Mexico named its first woman president in bloodiest election in modern history

Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected as Mexico’s first female president (Picture: AFP)

Mexican ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum is set to become the country’s first female president, after emerging victorious from a bloody election campaign which has seen 37 politicians assassinated by the cartels.

Frontrunner Sheinbaum, who currently serves as mayor of Mexico City and was groomed for the role by outgoing president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Amlo), declared victory after securing around 60% of the vote- an unassailable lead.

The 61-year-old climate scientist has vowed to continue the political project started by her mentor ALMO, which seeks to champion Mexico’s poor, young and elderly.

Here’s all you need to know about the first woman president in the Mexican republic’s 200 year history:

Sheinbaum has vowed to continue the progressive policies of her mentor and departing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Picture: Getty)

Protest to politics

The second of three children, Sheinbaum hails from a Jewish family who migrated to Mexico from Bulgaria as they fled Nazi aggression in the 1930s.

Growing up in Mexico City, Sheinbaum learned to play the guitar and studied ballet, details that her critics have used to paint her as elitist and out of touch with ordinary Mexicans.

But her activism and sense of civic duty started early, and at 15 she volunteered to help groups of mothers searching for their missing children- a long-standing plight in a country with a history of raging gangland violence.

Some time later, she met leading human rights activist and leftist politician Rosario Ibarra, who would later be the first woman to run for president in 1982. Sheinbaum would later declare that Mexico’s ruling left-wing party Morena, which she belongs to, had inherited Ibarra’s struggles.

Sheinbaum later became an active participant in student protest movements during the 1980s, and in 1995 earned her doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

As she prepared her doctoral thesis, she spent time at the University of California at Berkeley in the United States, where she polished her fluent English.

‘I grew up with that duality – a belief that politics can transform the world alongside an academic and scientific mindset,’ she later reflected.

Climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City won the election by a landslide (Picture: AP)

Political career

After pursuing a teaching and academic career throughout the mid-90s, Sheinbaum’s political career took off in 2000 when Amlo, then the newly-elected mayor of Mexico City, picked her to be his environment chief.

After proving herself capable in the role, Sheinbaum then integrated herself more closely within Amlo’s inner circle, acting as his spokesperson and playing a key role in the president’s election campaign.

In 2015, she was elected to run Mexico City’s largest borough, Tlalpan, and soon after notched up a historic election victory as the capital’s first woman mayor in 2018, the same year that Amlo’s third run for the presidency proved successful in a landslide win.

During her tenure, Sheinbaum has won plaudits for improving security within Mexico City and slashing the capital’s murder rate falling 50%.

Electoral Success

Nearly 100 million Mexicans took to the polls last week to vote on Amlo’s replacement, after the Mexican constitution bans candidates from seeking more than one term in office.

Opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez, a female rival who is also 61, received 26% of the vote, while Jorge Alvarez Maynez, 38, picked up around 10%.

In her victory speech, Sheinbaum thanked Mr Lopez Obrador, describing him as ‘a unique person who has transformed our country for the better’.

She has vowed to continue with his political programme, which includes a universal pension for the elderly and a programme paying youths to undertake apprenticeships.

Sheinbaum wants to assume Amlo’s mantle as a defender of the state, cement public control of natural resources, as well as strengthen his welfare programs and flagship infrastructure projects. But in a slight departure from the party norm, she has also called for a greater emphasis on renewable energy usage.

The president-elect said: ‘We will dedicate public funds to continue the president’s social programmes.’

She also stated her intention to maintain a ‘friendly relationship’ with the United States, although emphasised that her government ‘will always defend Mexicans’ in the US.

Mario Delgado, the ruling party’s leader said on Sunday ‘There is no doubt about the triumph of Claudia Sheinbaum…Today sovereignty, independence and democracy have triumphed.’

‘We are facing an unprecedented feat in our country,’ Mr Delgado was quoted as saying by La Jornada. ‘The people of Mexico have taken a leap towards complementarity and balance, blocking the way for a morally and politically tiny opposition, a racist, classist and corrupt minority, whose only project was to ruin the country in order to keep it and hand it over to transnational monsters.’

Bloodiest election in history

Yet despite the jubilation behind Sheinbaum’s landslide victory, which will see her party take a two-thirds supermajority in the Mexican congress, the president-elect’s victory comes with a very human cost.

The most recent election has to date been the bloodiest in Mexican history, after a record number of candidates were assassinated before polling day.

38 candidates were killed in the run-up to the election-presumably by the cartels and affiliates- and Sunday’s vote was further marred by the killing of two people at polling stations in Puebla state.

The Puebla consultancy also recorded 828 non-lethal attacks on candidates during the election season, up from 749 since Monday.

Earlier this week, a local mayoral candidate in southern Guerrero state wasalso gunned down at point-blank range during a campaign rally.

It follows a recent precedent established during the 2021 midterm elections, which saw 37 candidates deemed unfriendly to cartel interests murdered during the campaign.

In 2023, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Mexico as the seventh worst country when it came to impunity for violence against the press. According to Reporters Without Borders, at least 37 journalists have been killed since Lopez Obrador took office. 

In April,the murder of a journalist in Morelos led to protests outside the prosecutor’s office, demanding greater accountability.

Sheinbaum begins her term on October 1, as does the new Congress as well as governors in nine states. 

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