Claudia Sheinbaum was elected by a landslide on Sunday as the first Jewish and first female president in Mexico’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 after she won around 58-60% of votes, according to a preliminary count.
Sheinbaum, formerly the mayor of Mexico City and a scientist by training, was born to a Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal Ashkenazi grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s, while her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated there from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays at her grandparents’ homes.
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 where National Action took 22.3% and the Institutional Revolutionary Party took 16.5%.
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.
The elections were widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, a populist who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico. His Morena party currently holds 23 of the 32 governorships and a simple majority of seats in both houses of Congress. Mexico’s constitution prohibits the president’s reelection.
Sheinbaum promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.
Gálvez, whose father was Indigenous Otomi, rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms. A candidate running with a coalition of major opposition parties, she left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets” policy. She pledged to more aggressively go after criminals.
The persistent cartel violence and Mexico’s middling economic performance were the main issues on voters’ minds.
Beyond the fight for control of Congress, the race for Mexico City mayor — a post now considered equivalent to a governorship — is also important. Sheinbaum is just the latest of many Mexico City mayors, including López Obrador, who went on to run for president.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem & AP)
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10 Responses
Married goyim. Comes from the Bernie track.
“Of course I know where I come from, but my parents were atheists,” Ms. Sheinbaum told The New York Times in a 2020 interview. “I never belonged to the Jewish community. We grew up a little removed from that.”
In addition, Ms. Sheinbaum was married in a Catholic ceremony to Jesus Tarriba. She maintains far-left views and her views on Israel align closely with another “Jew” Bernie Sanders.
I’m not sure we want to claim this one.
She is totally assimilated. At most the significance is that she is the first non-Hispanic president of Mexico, i.e. the first not descended from the colonial power’s colonists (the US had no president not descended from the colonial powers until the 20th century, when Eisenhower, who was of German descent, was elected, and none since). Given her ideology, she is probably to be quite hostile from our perspectives.
Not good as a Jew, and a terrible leader as a person, she is a far left lunatic who cares only for the elites.
It will be business as usual in Mexico, cartels running their territories and the government getting kickbacks
Not a great manager, if her time as mayor of Mexico City is the metric. Large portions of the City could literally run out of water later this month and as anyone who has viisted in the past few year, the long-standing homeless problem has escalated beyond belief. Her
“progressive” policies are really not much different than the populist policies of her soon-to-be predecessor and the increased government takeover of PEMEX and the energy sector will likely lead them down the same downward spiral as Venezuela.
if she were kosher, we might see glatt kosher burritos and tacos being made in Mexico
Atheists shmatheists. Hitler ym”sh would have considered her Jewish.
Hitler is not my rabbi.
The good news is that anyone with a name sounding like a Sheinbaum can now pass as a Mexican American.
“If she were kosher, we might see glatt kosher burritos and tacos being made in Mexico”
Well, you already can…..if you ever get to Mexico City, try dinner a El Carboncito. Some really authentic Mexican food with good hashgacha from the local vaad. About 10 minute taxi ride from the major downtown hotels. Food is great but service is what you would sadly expect from too many casual kosher dining establishments.