“We will always defend and work for the supreme interest of the people of Mexico,” said Claudia Sheinbaum in a Wednesday X post. Mexican voters recently made history by electing Sheinbaum as president.
Here’s what you need to know about the first woman president the county has elected in its 200-year history.
According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, Sheinbaum, 61, was born in Mexico City. Her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria and Lithuania.
Sheinbaum earned a master’s degree at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where she studied environmental engineering. She went on to earn a PhD at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and then returned to Mexico to UNAM.
“Sheinbaum spent four years at Berkeley Lab as a researcher during the 1990s,” said the Berkeley Lab this month. “As a doctoral student in engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, she worked in the Lab’s Energy Technologies Area, analyzing energy use in buildings and the Mexican transportation sector. She was a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.”
After establishing her career in science, Sheinbaum decided to really kick off her political career in 2015. That’s when she became the president of the Tlapan neighborhood of Mexico City, per the Jewish Women’s Archive. In 2018 she was elected Mayor of Mexico City.
“She is affiliated with Mexico’s leftist political wing and served as environment minister in 2000 under leftist mayor López Obrador,” said the archive. “She joined Obrador’s new National Regeneration Movement party in 2014.”
CBS News reported that the National Electoral Institute’s president said Sheinbaum had between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote in the presidential election 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. Close to 100 million people were registered to vote, “but turnout appeared to be slightly lower than in past elections,” CBS said.
As of last March, just 59 countries had ever had a woman as their president, according to the Pew Research Center. This week, Newsweek published a map of countries that have never elected a female president.
While former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote in 2016, the U.S. has not yet had a female president. Current Vice President Kamala Harris is the woman to hold the highest office in the country so far.
“I congratulate Claudia Sheinbaum on her historic election as the first woman President of Mexico. I look forward to working closely with President-elect Sheinbaum in the spirit of partnership and friendship that reflects the enduring bonds between our two countries,” said U.S. President Joe Biden this week. “I express our commitment to advancing the values and interests of both our nations to the benefit of our peoples. I also congratulate the Mexican people for conducting a nationwide successful democratic electoral process involving races for more than 20,000 positions at the local, state, and federal levels.”