For the first time in its 200-year history, a woman has been projected to become the first President of Mexico.
In an election with all kinds of barriers stacked against women contestants and signposted by several high profile assassinations, leftist Claudia Sheinbaum, a former Mayor of Mexico City, had secured between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote as at Sunday night.
Indeed, CBS News reported that two of her opponents in the poll had conceded victory and had called to congratulate her.
Victorious Claudia Sheinbaum, a 62-year-old climate scientist, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of supporters in a downtown hotel after the electoral umpire announced a statistical sample that projected her as having an irreversible lead.
Beaming with broad smiles, she declared: “I will become the first woman president of Mexico.”
“I don’t make it alone,’ she continued. “We’ve all made it, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”
“We have demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections,” she concluded.
Sheinbaum’s political mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, congratulated the President-elect shortly after the announcement by the electoral authorities.
“Of course, I congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum with all my respect who ended up the winner by a wide margin,” López Obrador said. “She is going to be Mexico’s first (woman) president in 200 years.”
CBN News projected that if the margin holds, it would approach the outgoing President’s landslide victory in 2018. López Obrador won the presidency after two unsuccessful tries with 53.2% of the votes, in a three-way race in which National Action took 22.3% and the Institutional Revolutionary Party took 16.5%.
