Claudia Sheinbaum to be the first female president in Mexico

In a historic first, Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling left, became the first woman to hold the presidency in Mexico after beating her right-wing rival Xóchitl Gálvez, by a wide margin.

On Sunday, since the early hours of the morning, hundreds of thousands of voters flocked to polling stations to cast their ballots in the main election, which has seen riots, in a country plagued by widespread violence caused by drug gangs and high rates of violent crime against women, according to United Nations reports.

The 61-year-old climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City said Sunday night that her rivals had contacted her and acknowledged her victory.

After a poll showed Sheinbaum winning, the ruling party “Morena” candidate said with a smile that she had made irreversible progress and indicated that she would become the first woman president since the country’s founding.

Speaking in front of a downtown hotel, she added that she didn’t achieve this victory alone, but it was achieved in cooperation with all the heroic women, with the mothers, daughters and granddaughters of Mexico.

“We’ve proven that Mexico is a democracy that holds peaceful elections”.

The head of the National Electoral Institute said Sheinbaum won 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, far ahead of opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, who received nearly 26.6% and 28.6% of the vote.

The results showed that the centrist candidate Jorge Álvarez Mainz received between 9.9% and 10.8% of the vote, placing him in third place.

The ruling party candidate campaigned on the basis of continuing the political path set for her by her political mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, over the past six years.

Shortly after the preliminary results were released, Obrador, who isn’t eligible to run after serving 6 years as president, congratulated Sheinbaum, saying, “I respectfully congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum, who has made a significant lead.

She will be Mexico’s first female president in 200 years”.

Her rival Galvez called on her supporters to be patient until the official results are available.

Nearly 100 million people were registered to cast their ballots, but turnout appears to have been slightly lower than in the previous election.

Voters also elected governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, choosing candidates for both houses of Congress and thousands of mayors and other local offices in the country’s largest election, which was marked by violence after some 38 candidates were killed in a series of assassinations.

Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory is a historic shift in a country ranked by the United Nations as one of the most violent crimes against women in the world.

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City, and her parents, Ashkenazi Jews, immigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the twenties.

Her Sephardic mother’s parents emigrated from Bulgaria’s Sofia in the early forties to escape the Holocaust.

Sheinbaum studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she received an undergraduate degree in 1989 followed by a master’s degree in 1994 and a doctorate in 1995 in energy engineering, and has more than 100 articles and two books on the topics of energy, environment and sustainable development.