Claudia Sheinbaum won Mexico’s presidential election on Sunday in a landslide victory.
Sheinbaum is expected to have won around 60% of the vote, The Associated Press reported. Her opposition, Xóchitl Gálvez, another female candidate, won 26.6% to 28.6% of the vote and Jorge Álvarez Máynez won nearly 10% of the vote per preliminary results.
“For the first time in the 200 years of the republic I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said in a speech Monday morning, per The Guardian “We imagine a plural, diverse and democratic Mexico. Our duty is and will always be to look after each and every Mexican, without distinction.”
She added, per CNN, “Even though many Mexicans do not fully agree with our project, we will have to walk in peace and harmony to continue building a fair and more prosperous Mexico.”
Sheinbaum’s victory marks the end of “the most violent campaign in Mexico’s history,” the Deseret News previously reported. Either 32 or 34 candidates have been murdered since September 2023, with a dozen having been kidnapped and hundreds of campaign officials targeted with violence.
Her six-year term as president is set to begin on Oct. 1.
Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?
The 61-year-old former mayor of Mexico City is a lifelong progressive and climate scientist. She’s also the first Jewish person to win the presidency, in addition to being the first woman elected. Her maternal grandparents fled Europe during the Holocaust and emigrated to Mexico, where Sheinbaum was born in 1962.
During college, she protested the privatization of education in Mexico, setting the stage for her foray into national politics, per CNN. She got a master’s degree in engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2000, Mexico’s current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador appointed her environment secretary of Mexico City before her tenure as the city’s mayor.
She left mayoral office in favor of studying energy with the International Panel on Climate Change and, with her team, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She returned to politics in 2015 and was elected head of the Tlalpan district of Mexico City, the first woman to do so, CNN reported. In 2018, she also became the first woman reelected to run Mexico City. She stepped down in 2023 to launch her campaign for the presidency.
She aligned herself with López Obrador, helping her win over his supporters. Sheinbaum promised to maintain his social policies, including a continuation of funding for the elderly and single mothers and shoring up infrastructure.
Sheinbaum’s campaign also outlined plans to create a “national care system” of childcare facilities Time magazine reported. She also seeks to expand the military’s role “in areas typically reserved for civil society, such as domestic security,” per The Guardian.