Mexican voters have elected the country’s first female president, a Jewish woman named Claudia Sheinbaum who leads the ruling party, Morena.
Sheinbaum is a climate scientist and former head of Mexico City’s government who has also contributed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
She won the presidency with between 58.3 percent and 60.7 percent of the vote, the highest vote tally percentage in Mexico’s democratic history, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority.
Opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez took between 26.6 percent and 28.6 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results.
The vote, which took place on Sunday, upended the country’s 200-year history of male dominance in Mexican politics.
Sheinbaum is the first-ever female and first-ever Jewish person elected to the presidency, born to a Jewish family in Mexico City.
The president-elect’s paternal Ashkenazi grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920; her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated to the same city from Plovdiv, Bulgaria in 1940’s to escape the Holocaust.
Only two women have officially sought Mexico’s highest office in the past, and both failed to win their elections.
Sheinbaum will succeed her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who could not run again due to term limits. She is set to take office in October.
