Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidential elections in Mexico and becomes the first woman to lead the government of the country, according to official preliminary results. She will also be the first president of the country with Jewish heritage. The climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City capitalized on the wave of popularity of her long-time political ally, leftist Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and her party Morena.
The Mexican electoral authorities said that preliminary results showed that the former mayor of Mexico City, 61, received between 58% and 60% of the votes in Sunday’s elections (2). This put her about 30 percentage points ahead of her main rival, businesswoman Xóchitl Gálvez.
Sheinbaum will replace her mentor, outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on October 1.
Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?
Claudia Sheinbaum’s list of attributes is long: she holds a PhD in energy engineering, participated in a panel of climate scientists from the United Nations that received the Nobel Peace Prize, and governed the capital of Mexico, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.
On Sunday, she added another achievement to her resume: becoming the first woman elected president of Mexico.
“For the first time in 200 years of republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” she said. “And as I have said before, I do not arrive alone. We all arrive, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters, and our granddaughters,” she stated.
Now that she has secured the presidency, Sheinbaum’s next challenge will be to step out of the shadow of her predecessor and long-time mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current president.
She and López Obrador are “different people,” she said in an interview. He is an oilman who invested in environmentally questionable projects; she is a climate scientist. However, Sheinbaum appealed to voters primarily by promising to cement Obrador’s legacy.
Their alliance has also left many Mexicans wondering: Can Sheinbaum be a leader? Or will she merely be a pawn?
“There is the idea, because many columnists say this, that I have no personality,” Sheinbaum complained to reporters earlier this year. “That President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells me what to do.”
She insists that she will govern independently of López Obrador and has some different priorities. But straying too far from her mentor’s agenda could be quite risky for her political future.
Source: The New York Times