For the first time in history, Mexico has elected a woman to serve as its president. Claudia Sheinbaum—who, according to projections, bested her main opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez, by a margin of about 30%—will officially assume office in October.
With upwards of 20,000 local and federal positions in play, Mexican citizens also voted for members of Congress, the governors of eight states, and the head of Mexico City’s government during this election.
Beyond becoming Mexico’s first female head of state, Sheinbaum, a Nobel Prize–winning climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City (from 2018 to 2023), will also have the distinction of being the first Jewish person to hold that role. (She is Ashkenazi on her father’s side and Sephardic on her mother’s, though CNN has noted that “she rarely speaks publicly about her personal background and has governed as a secular leftist.”) An ally and protégé of the broadly popular outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum had been the front-runner in this year’s election since her candidacy was announced last September.
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Given her close ties to López Obrador—she was Mexico City’s secretary of the environment when he was mayor in the early 2000s—Sheinbaum is expected to continue many of his projects, including a robust pension plan for senior citizens, a scholarship program for low-income students and at-risk youth, and infrastructure schemes such as the Maya Train.
She has also outlined a solution to Mexico’s problem with violent crime—especially that related to drug trafficking—by way of strengthened national intelligence and a consolidated National Guard. (More than 30,000 people were murdered in Mexico last year—compared to about 18,500 in the United States—with several local politicians among them.) And, as The New Republic has reported, her climate platform includes a goal to meet 50% of Mexico’s electricity demand with a mix of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal power by 2030. (Sheinbaum received her PhD in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1995, going on to teach for a time at its Institute of Engineering.)
And then there is Mexico’s complicated relationship with the United States. Sheinbaum will have to confront not only the drug cartels blamed for the scourge of fentanyl-related overdoses and deaths in the US but also the flow of migrants across Mexico’s northern border—and all while navigating a commercial dynamic that made Mexico the US’s single biggest trading partner in 2023.
“This is the triumph of the people of Mexico,” Sheinbaum told supporters early on Monday morning, after the official quick count of Mexico’s National Electoral Institute showed that she had captured 58.3 to 60.7% of the vote. (The election’s official result will be announced on June 8.) “I will not fail you.”