Mexico elects first female president to break sexist ‘machista’ grip
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Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico’s first ever female president, a landmark moment in a society infamous for its “machista” culture of entrenched sexism.
Dr Sheinbaum, 61, of the leftist Morena party of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won a crushing victory, achieving around 59% of the votes cast, according to an official quick count.
In a country where women only achieved the right to vote in 1953 and were, two decades ago, referred to by the then president as “two-legged washing machines,” her victory is being seen as a huge step forward.
As president, Dr Sheinbaum has pledged to launch a specialist prosecutors’ office to deal with the epidemic of femicides – up to 10 a day, according to the United Nations – and force domestic abusers to leave home. “We transform, we are warriors who open paths for other women,” she said on the campaign trail.
Yet she also faces huge questions, not just from feminists about her commitment to tackling gender inequality, but across a range of issues, from solving the migrant crisis to halting the drug cartels’ rampant bloodletting.
A former mayor of Mexico City, Dr Sheinbaum, who holds a PhD in energy engineering and was a member of a UN climate research team that won a Nobel Prize in 2007, is widely seen as an accomplished public servant.
But doubts exist over whether she will be a strong leader or allow a man, her mentor Mr López Obrador, to run her presidency from behind the scenes.
He was the one who elevated her from relative political obscurity to be his successor. Enjoying a consistent lead of around 20 points, she ran a cautious campaign, largely pledging to stick to his policies, including his generous social spending.
She has even adopted his brusque tone towards the victims of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has claimed more lives under Mr López Obrador than any other president.
“It’s better to make proposals than to criticise,” she recently said of mothers of the thousands of disappeared, displaying a steely – opponents say callous – edge.
The one issue on which she has voiced differences with Mr López Obrador is her personal area of expertise, renewable energy, which she has vowed to ramp up. That contrasts starkly with his prioritising of Pemex, the archaic state-owned oil monopoly.
Many also worry that she will continue her mentor’s attacks on democratic institutions, including the internationally respected electoral agency, and potentially even return Mexico to the authoritarianism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
It ruled the country from 1929 to 2000, simulating the rituals of a liberal democracy, including elections, while stuffing ballot boxes, bribing journalists and, on occasion, killing opponents, in a system the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once famously called “the perfect dictatorship”.
Much will depend on who Dr Sheinbaum appoints to her cabinet, according to Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Villanova University. “López Obrador remains very popular. I think we will see him having a close relationship with Sheinbaum,” he said.
Mexicans cast their votes on Sunday in the country’s largest ever elections, which were marred by violence.
A total of 38 candidates were killed during the campaign – along with a similar number of party workers – as the drug cartels made their presence felt. Two people were killed at polling stations in the central state of Puebla.
