Mexico elects a female president before the USA

Mexico has elected its first female president – a U.S.-trained climate scientist and former mayor whose overwhelming victory on Sunday reflects both the continued dominance of the country’s ruling party and the tremendous progress women have made in this country’s politics.

It is no coincidence that Mexico has a woman at its head, ahead of the USA and most other countries in the world.

In Mexico, political parties have been required for years to ensure that at least 50% of candidates in federal, state and local elections are female.

As a result, politics have changed: More than half of the members of Congress and nearly a third of the governors are women, and women head the Supreme Court and the ministries of the interior, education, economy, public security and foreign affairs.

Political analysts say female leaders have helped advance some of Mexico’s most progressive policies, including a federal law giving domestic workers the right to social security and the decriminalization of abortion in several states before the Supreme Court ruled last year that it should be legal nationwide.

Supporters of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum celebrate early Monday in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square.

(Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)

The election of Claudia Sheinbaum breaks the last glass ceiling in politics in a country where women were excluded from the vote until 1954 and where a culture of sexism and high rates of violence against women still prevail.

“In 200 years of the Mexican Republic, I am the first female president,” 61-year-old Sheinbaum told her supporters in her acceptance speech on Sunday evening, describing her victory as a victory for all women.

“I didn’t arrive alone,” she said. “We all arrived.”

She is set to be sworn in on October 1, taking the helm of a prosperous but divided country plagued by widespread gang violence.

Sheinbaum has vowed to continue the path of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The populist widely known as AMLO helped fight poverty by doubling the minimum wage and expanding the country’s welfare system while giving the military extraordinary new powers and failing to curb cartel violence.

It supports some of his most controversial proposals, including a series of constitutional changes that critics say could undermine the democratic system of checks and balances.

Her exceptionally large victory – she received more than twice as many votes as her main rival – was widely seen as a vote of confidence in López Obrador and the Morena party he founded.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador greets his supporters in 2019 together with the then mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum.

(Fernando Llano / Associated Press)

But how Sheinbaum will cope in his long shadow is already the central question of her presidency. López Obrador has announced his intention to retire from politics, but many wonder if he will find a way to stay in the political struggle that has defined his entire adult life.

Sheinbaum, for her part, dismissed the suggestion that she would be the former president’s puppet as sexist. “There’s a hint of misogyny, of machismo,” she said in an interview.

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

“The generals, the union leaders, the party leaders, the managers of the chambers of commerce … are not just men, they act culturally according to patriarchal rules,” he wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Sheinbaum owes her political career to López Obrador, the then mayor of Mexico City, who brought the then university professor out of academic obscurity and appointed her as his Minister of the Environment.

He then supported several other election campaigns that catapulted Sheinbaum into his former position as mayor of the capital and now to his successor as president.

In her usual campaign speeches, Sheinbaum regularly refers to her teacher as Mexico’s “greatest president” of all time on all political issues. She adopts his slogan and promises to “put the poor first.”

“It’s hard to believe” that López Obrador will withdraw completely from politics, said Lila Abed, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington. “But he will probably allow (Sheinbaum) to express her own position on certain issues.”

One aspect is energy policy. López Obrador has invested billions of dollars in refinery projects and in supporting the ailing state-owned oil giant Pemex.

When asked how her policies might differ, Sheinbaum inevitably points broadly to her scientific background, which includes a doctorate in environmental engineering and four years of study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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

Her commitment to science was evident from the early days of the pandemic, when López Obrador ignored social distancing recommendations and toured the country – handcuffing admirers, hugging and kissing supporters and urging his countrymen to continue eating in restaurants.

Sheinbaum, then mayor of Mexico City, was one of several insiders credited with working behind the scenes to persuade the president to change course and advocate mask-wearing and greater caution.

“She asked people to wear masks, she locked down the city and advocated social distancing, while AMLO said the opposite,” Abed said.

Experts say Sheinbaum is also likely to take a more decisive stance on gender issues than her predecessor, an area that activists regularly accuse López Obrador of neglecting.

Her criticism was often directed at Sheinbaum, even though she had spoken out against violence against women and the grim statistic that an average of ten women are killed every day.

In 2022, she pushed for the arrest and prosecution of the suspected killers in one of the country’s most high-profile cases: the murder of Ariadna Fernanda López Ruiz, whose mangled body was found on a highway outside the capital. Sheinbaum claimed the prosecutor covered up the incident, and he was later charged in the case.

Initial results suggest that Sheinbaum received more votes than any other candidate in decades.

As of Monday afternoon, she was ahead with 59 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent for her closest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, a former senator who is running for a coalition of opposition parties that are largely united against López Obrador.

Since there were two female leading candidates in Mexico, it had been clear for months that a woman would be elected president.

A supporter of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum awaits her arrival in the early hours of the Monday after the election in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square.

(Matias Delacroix / Associated Press)

Many credited the introduction of gender quotas primarily with the work of activists, an effort that dates back to the country’s transition to democracy.

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

In the 2003 elections, lawmakers initially set a mandatory quota of 30 percent for female candidates and later raised this hurdle to 40 percent for the 2009 elections.

For a while, parties tried to circumvent these requirements by fielding women in weaker constituencies or by making backroom deals to ensure that female candidates would step down after the election and leave their posts to men.

In response, politicians from across the ideological spectrum formed a coalition to, They are taking parties to court and urging election officials to tighten quota rules.

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

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

“Even if all forms of gender equality have not been resolved, I think it is important now that there is no longer a little girl in Mexico who believes that a woman cannot be president,” she said.

Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.