Mexico election 2024 highlights: Claudia Sheinbaum set to become president
Mexico’s projected presidential winner Claudia Sheinbaum will become the first woman president in the country’s 200-year history.
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Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum holds an irreversible lead in the 2024 Mexico election that would make her the country’s first female president, according to an official quick count.
Women are excited by the chance to vote for female candidates in Mexican election
At a special voting post on a large Mexico City medical campus where people like on-duty doctors and nurses who can’t get home to vote can cast their ballots, men and women are waiting for polls to open..
Aida Fabiola Valencia said, “yesterday I told my colleagues to go vote, I don’t know who they are going to vote for but it is the first time they are going to be able to elect a woman, who I think is going to play an important role, we (women) are 60% of the population, it is historic.”
There have been female candidates before in Mexico, but this is the first time the two leading candidates — Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez — are women.
FILE - This combo image shows opposition presidential candidate Xochitl Galvez, left, on July 4, 2023, and presidential frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum, on May 29, 2024, both in Mexico City. Voters choosing Mexico’s next president will decide on Sunday, June 2, 2024, between Sheinbaum, a former mayor and academic, and Galvez, an ex-senator and tech entrepreneur. A third candidate from a smaller party trails far behind. (AP Photo/File)
FILE - This combo image shows opposition presidential candidate Xochitl Galvez, left, on July 4, 2023, and presidential frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum, on May 29, 2024, both in Mexico City. Voters choosing Mexico’s next president will decide on Sunday, June 2, 2024, between Sheinbaum, a former mayor and academic, and Galvez, an ex-senator and tech entrepreneur. A third candidate from a smaller party trails far behind. (AP Photo/File)
Nearby, Mónica Martínez, said “The fact that people vote for a candidate who is a woman implies a lot of change at all social and work levels, that means that it is already starting to get better. It already is. But the fact that it is for a presidential candidacy is much more significant.”
Voters line up ahead of Mexico’s historic election
On the fringes of Mexico City in the neighborhood of San Andres Totoltepec, electoral officials filed past 34-year-old homemaker Stephania Navarrete, who watched dozens of cameramen and electoral officials gathering where frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum was set to vote.
Navarrete said she planned to vote for Sheinbaum despite her own doubts about outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his party.
“Having a woman president, for me as a Mexican woman, it’s going to be like before when for the simple fact that you say you are a woman you’re limited to certain professions. Not anymore.”
She said the social programs of Sheinbaum’s mentor were crucial, but that deterioration of cartel violence in the past few years was her primary concern in this election.
“That is something that they have to focus more on,” she said. “For me security is the major challenge. They said they were going to lower the levels of crime, but no, it was the opposite, they shot up. Obviously, I don’t completely blame the president, but it is in a certain way his responsibility.”