Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish scientist, environmentalist and left-wing politician, became the first woman ever to be elected mayor of Mexico’s capital on Sunday, according to exit polls.

Sheinbaum won the election to lead Mexico City, North America’s largest city, with between 47.5 and 55.5 percent of the vote, according to the polling firm Mitofsky. It caps a rapid political rise for the 56-year-old Sheinbaum.

She will not be the first woman to govern Mexico City — Rosario Robles held the job on an interim basis from 1999 to 2000, after her boss, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, resigned to run for president.

But it is a historic electoral win in a country with deep-rooted problems of gender inequality and violence against women.

Sheinbaum surged into office on the coattails of the anti-establishment leftist who won the presidential race on Sundy, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

She was among the first politicians to leave Mexico’s established left-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and join Lopez Obrador’s breakaway, Morena, when he formally launched it in 2014.

The following year, she won election as district mayor of Mexico City’s Tlalpan neighborhood, Lopez Obrador’s own district and one of the 16 “delegations” that make up the sprawling capital of more than nine million people.

Sheinbaum was born into a Jewish family of scientists.

In a speech last month, she told a Jewish audience she was connected with the Jewish community thanks to her grandparents, who emigrated from Lithuania and Bulgaria.

She said: “We celebrated all the Jewish holidays at my grandparents’ house.”

According to the World Jewish Congress, nearly all of Mexico’s 40,000 Jews live in Mexico City.

She studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, earning a doctorate in energy engineering and going on to work as a consultant for the United Nations.

She was active in the university’s student movement, which rose up against an unpopular series of reforms at the institution in 1986.

She was one of many veterans of the movement to go into politics and help launch the PRD in 1989 — the main opposition party in what was then a one-party state.

When Lopez Obrador was elected Mexico City mayor in 2000, he named Sheinbaum his environment minister.

She followed the fiery leader when he split with the PRD to found Morena, and is seen as a close ally, winning the party’s mayoral nomination in August over the man who was considered the favorite, veteran politician Ricardo Monreal.

(YWN / AP)