Mexico set for first female president as main parties pick women candidates

Mexico will almost certainly have its first female president in 2024, after the governing Morena party and the opposition coalition both chose women as their candidates.

- Thomas Graham

The former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum has been named Morena's candidate, despite runner-up Marcelo Ebrard's last-minute denouncement of the process and demand for it to be redone.

Sheinbaum is a climate scientist-turned-politician widely believed to be the preferred choice of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is unable to run again.

She has presented herself as a continuity candidate and stands to benefit from López Obrador's enduring popularity as well as the support of the state apparatus during the coming campaign.

Until recently, Morena had seemed assured of victory in the June 2024 elections, but the dramatic emergence in recent months of the senator Xochitl Gálvez as the opposition candidate has upended expectations.

Gálvez is a businesswoman who became a senator in 2018 and has seized media attention with her aspirational story of growing up with an Indigenous father and mestizo (mixed race) mother in Hidalgo state, before working her way through public university and into business and politics.