(CBS News) Mexico’s projected presidential winner, Claudia Sheinbaum, will become the first woman president in the country’s 200-year history.
The climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor said Sunday night that her two competitors had called her and conceded her victory.
“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said with a smile, speaking at a downtown hotel shortly after electoral authorities announced a statistical sample showed she held an irreversible lead. “I don’t make it alone. 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 said.
The National Electoral Institute’s president said Sheinbaum had between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to the statistical sample. Opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez had between 26.6% and 28.6% of the vote and Jorge Álvarez Máynez had between 9.9% and 10.8% of the vote.
The preliminary tally, which started off very slowly, put Sheinbaum 27 points ahead of Gálvez with 42% of polling place tallies counted shortly after her victory speech.
The governing party candidate campaigned on continuing the political course set over the last six years by her political mentor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
His anointed successor, the 61-year-old Sheinbaum led the campaign wire-to-wire despite a spirited challenge from Gálvez. This was the first time in Mexico that the two main opponents were women.
“Of course, I congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum with all my respect who ended up the winner by a wide margin,” López Obrador said shortly after electoral authorities announcement. “She is going to be Mexico’s first (woman) president in 200 years.”
If the margin holds, it would approach his 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%.
Earlier, Gálvez wrote on the social platform X, “The votes are there. Don’t let them hide them.”
Sheinbaum, described by Agence France-Presse as a “dedicated leftist known for keeping a cool head in times of crisis,” is the granddaughter of Bulgarian and Lithuanian Jewish migrants, AFP points out.
But AFP quotes Pamela Starr, a professor at the University of Southern California, as saying that, unlike López Obrador, Sheinbaum is “not a populist.”
“She is much more of a mainstream leftist politician” and likely to be “less ideological” than the outgoing president, Starr said.
Sheinbaum is seen as unlikely to enjoy the kind of unquestioning devotion that López Obrador has enjoyed. Both belong to the governing Morena party.
In Mexico City’s main colonial-era main plaza, the Zocalo, Sheinbaum’s lead didn’t initially draw the kind of cheering, jubilant crowds that greeted López Obrador’s victory in 2018.
Fernando Fernández, a chef, 28, joined the relatively small crowd, hoping for a Sheinbaum victory, but even he acknowledged there were problems.
“You vote for Claudia out of conviction, for AMLO,” Fernández said, referring to López Obrador by his initials, as most Mexicans do. But his highest hope is that Sheinbaum can “improve what AMLO couldn’t do, the price of gasoline, crime and drug trafficking, which he didn’t combat even though he had the power.”
Also in the crowd, Itxel Robledo, 28, a business administrator, expressed hope that Sheinbaum would do what López Obrador didn’t. “What Claudia has to do is put professionals in every area.”
Elsewhere in the city, Yoselin Ramírez, 29, said she voted for Sheinbaum, but split her vote for other posts because she didn’t want anyone holding a strong majority.
“I don’t want everything to be occupied by the same party, so there can be a little more equality,” she said without elaborating.
The main opposition candidate, Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur and former senator, tried to seize on Mexicans’ concerns about security and promised to take a more aggressive approach toward organized crime.
Nearly 100 million people were registered to vote, but turnout appeared to be slightly lower than in past elections. Voters were also electing governors in nine of the country’s 32 states, and choosing candidates for both houses of Congress, thousands of mayorships and other local posts, in the biggest elections the nation has seen and ones that have been marked by violence.
