Claudia Sheinbaum expected to win Mexico’s elections in a landslide and become the first female president

Supporters of Mexico’s Morena Party presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum wait for her in Zocalo Square on election day in Mexico City on June 2, 2024. Claudia Sheinbaum would be elected Mexico’s first female president, exit polls showed , a milestone in a country with a history of gender-based violence. (Yuri Cortés/AFP)

Claudia Sheinbaum is expected to be the winner of the Mexican presidential election, with an expected landslide victory of 56% according to exit polls.
The elections were known for their violence, including the killing of two people at polling stations.
Despite being criticized for potentially being a “puppet” for outgoing President Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum has pledged to expand welfare programs and continue many of Obrador’s policies. Her victory is seen as an important step towards gender equality in Mexico’s political landscape.

Mexico’s ruling party declared Claudia Sheinbaum the winner of the presidential election by a “large margin” after polls closed on Sunday, putting her on course to become the country’s first female president.

Pollster Parametria predicts that Sheinbaum will win a landslide 56% of the vote, while opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez will gain 30%, according to their exit polls.

Four other exit polls also said Sheinbaum would win.

Preliminary results will trickle in in the coming hours. Galvez has not relented and has told her supporters to be patient as they await the official results.

A victory for Sheinbaum would be a big step for Mexico, a country known for its macho culture. The winner will begin a six-year term on October 1. “I never thought that one day I would vote for a woman,” 87-year-old Edelmira Montiel, a Sheinbaum supporter in Mexico’s smallest state, Tlaxcala, said earlier on Sunday.

Montiel added:

We couldn’t even vote before, and when you could, it was voting for the person your husband told you to vote for. Thank God that has changed and I can live with it.

Sheinbaum’s ruling MORENA party has also declared its candidate the winner of the Mexico City mayoral race, one of the country’s most important races, although the opposition has disputed that, claiming its own candidate won the contest.

Sunday’s vote was marred by the killing of two people at polling stations in Puebla state, adding to multiple attacks that have made Mexico’s biggest-ever election also the most violent in modern history. About 38 candidates were killed, with the violence fueling concerns about the threat to democracy from warring drug cartels.

Security fears dominated the concerns of many voters at the ballot box, and Sheinbaum will be tasked with combating organized crime. More people have been killed during the term of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador than during any other administration in Mexico’s modern history, although the murder rate has fallen during his time in office.

READ | Mexico is about to elect its first female president as voters cast their ballots

Pre-election polls showed that MORENA and its allies are unlikely to be able to win a two-thirds majority in Congress. That would make it harder for Sheinbaum to push constitutional reforms past the opposition parties.

American relations

Among the new president’s challenges are tense negotiations with the United States over the massive flows of U.S.-bound migrants crossing Mexico and security cooperation on drug trafficking at a time when America’s fentanyl epidemic is raging.

Mexican officials expect these negotiations will become more difficult if Donald Trump wins the US presidency in November. Trump has pledged to impose 100% tariffs on Chinese cars made in Mexico and said he would mobilize special forces to fight the cartels.

Domestically, the next president will be tasked with addressing electricity and water shortages and pushing manufacturers to relocate as part of the nearshoring trend, in which companies move their supply chains closer to their primary markets.

The election winner will also have to grapple with what to do with Pemex, the state oil giant that has seen production decline and drowning in debt for two decades.

Sheinbaum has pledged to expand welfare programs, even though Mexico is running a large deficit this year and the central bank expects sluggish GDP growth of just 1.5% next year.

Lopez Obrador loomed large during the campaign, seeking to turn the vote into a referendum on his political agenda. Sheinbaum has rejected opposition claims that she is a puppet of Lopez Obrador, although she has pledged to continue many of his policies, including those that have helped Mexico’s poorest.

Political analyst Viri Rios said she thought it was pure sexism for people to think Sheinbaum would be a puppet.

“It’s unbelievable that people can’t believe that she’s going to make her own decisions, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that she’s a woman,” she said.

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