In groundbreaking election, Mexicans are poised to elect their first female president today

Mexicans were voting Sunday in an election set to give the nation its first female president — a groundbreaking development in a country where women could not cast ballots for president until 1954.

“Never in my entire life did I imagine that a woman would be president of my country,” said Cristina Navarrete Santillán, 76, who went to the polls in the southern Mexico City neighborhood of Tlalpan accompanied by her two daughters and two granddaughters. “I am glad to be alive to see it.”

Navarrete cast her ballot for former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, the hand-picked candidate of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the clear front-runner in the race.

Polling in second place is Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, a senator who heads a center-right bloc of parties united largely in their opposition to López Obrador. Trailing far behind the female candidates is Jorge Álvarez Máynez, a member of congress.

The election, one of the most divisive in recent memory, is widely viewed as a referendum on López Obrador, a controversial populist who has lifted millions out of poverty but has alarmed critics by weakening some of the country’s democratic institutions.

Many of those who voted for Sheinbaum on Sunday said they did so in hopes that she will carry on with the president’s trademark anti-poverty policies, particularly his government’s widespread welfare payments to students and elderly people.

“She is going to continue with all the help that the president has given us,” said Rosa Maria Velazco, a 52-year-old teacher. “She will continue to support the poorest and will be a great president.”

Those who voted for Gálvez, on the other hand, largely said they were inspired not so much by the candidate’s profile or promised policies, but because she represented an end to López Obrador’s rule.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s president, kneels during an Indigenous ceremony during his inauguration in 2018.

( Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“I’m very angry at this government,” said Julieta Jujnovsky, 45, a professor of biology who cast her ballot in the upscale Mexico City enclave of Condesa.

Jujnovsky said it is not so much the president’s leftist ideology that she opposes, but rather his style of governing.

“He never wants to talk with the opposition,” said Jujnovsky, who said the president’s efforts to reform the Supreme Court, slash the number of seats in Mexico’s legislature and overhaul of the country’s elections institute were “deeply worrying.”

“Democracy has to do with counterweights and listening to the other side,” she said.

Sunday’s historic election is Mexico’s largest-ever, with voters also choosing a new Congress, eight state governors, the Mexico City mayor and some 20,000 local office-holders nationwide. In some parts of the country, voters lined up before dawn.

That was the case in the middle class neighborhood of San Andres Totoltepec, where Sheinbaum was reared and where she voted early Sunday.

As the candidate took her place in a line of about 100 people to cast her ballot, many in the crowd chanted: “Presidenta!”

Supporters of presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum crowd the Zocalo during her opening campaign rally in Mexico City on March 1.

(Aurea Del Rosario / Associated Press)

Should Sheinbaum triumph, as is widely expected, many will be looking at her final margin of victory for clues about the breadth of her support. Final polling showed Sheinbaum leading Gálvez by 14 to more than 25 points.

Her mentor won in a landslide six years ago vowing to finally put the “poor first” in a country that he said had been hijacked by a corrupt and conservative elite. López Obrador’s approval rating still tops 60%, making him one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

When he departs office in October, he will leave his successor with a strong economy that has been bolstered by the relocation of foreign firms from Asia and elsewhere to Mexico. The Mexican peso has been among the world’s strongest currencies.

But the next president will also inherit a number of crises, including dire water shortages, a struggling healthcare system, stubborn inequality and violence from criminal gangs and cartels so severe that the U.S. State Department warns its citizens not to travel to many Mexican states.

López Obrador’s controversial “hugs not bullets” strategy — prioritizing social programs for the young over direct confrontations with cartels — has failed to stem the country’s violence, although homicides have fallen some during the last six years. Security is by far Mexicans’ main concern, polls show.

While voters were fiercely split on the issues at the heart of the race, many on both sides of the political divide were elated to have the chance to vote for a woman.

Fewer than a third of the countries in the United Nations have ever had a female leader, according to a Pew Research Center analysis from last year. In Mexico, women have made big inroads in politics since a 2019 constitutional reform set quotas requiring gender parity in all elected posts at the federal, state and municipal levels. They now account for about half the Congress.

Rosa Maria Beltrán, a 39-year-old dentist, said she was proud of her country.

“Tell the people in the United States that in Mexico we are going to have a female president before them,” she said.

Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.