A resounding vote of confidence in Mexico’s retiring left-wing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has seen it elect its first woman president. Business confidence and the peso wobbled, but Claudia Sheinbaum, who took 59 per cent of the vote, has promised to continue López Obrador’s campaign for social justice . She has also pledged fiscal responsibility, respect for free trade, and to work to attract foreign investment. Their Morena party will also take control of the capital and seven of the eight state governorships.
Sheinbaum, a climate scientist in a Nobel Peace Prize-winning UN panel, former mayor of Mexico City, and a close ally of the outgoing president, faces Mexico’s worst budget deficit since the 1980s. It is the price of López Obrador’s welfare programmes and huge infrastructure projects. During an election campaign in which up to 36 candidates were murdered by drug cartels, she reiterated his controversial policy of emphasising the need to address the social drivers of violence instead of waging war on the criminal groups.
Her election is a remarkable achievement in a country renowned for a culture of machismo and rampant violence against women, but which has made trailblazing strides in their representation in recent years.
In 2019, Mexico made gender parity in all three branches of government a constitutional requirement and today half of the country’s legislature is made up of women . The chief justice, the leaders of both houses of congress and the central bank governor are all women, as are a number of senior ministers.
John McManus: Trump’s trade wars can push the UK closer to Europe
Kathy Sheridan: The public may not care who gets to speak in the Dáil, but they do care about being taken for fools
Celebrity Bear Hunt review: from Una Healy’s ‘nightmares’ to Bear Grylls’s apex predator, this is unhinged cruel comedy at its finest
Limerick’s Tom Morrissey returns from the Inca trail to take the high road to Croke Park
“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said after election. “I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”
Now, she is set to become the most powerful person in the country, commander of the armed forces, and will take control of the second largest economy in Latin America.
