Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, will become Mexico’s first female president after romping to victory in an election billed as a referendum on the leftist policies of departing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a vote that handed his party enough power in Congress to push through controversial constitutional changes.
Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling Movement of National Regeneration, known as Morena, had 58.6% of the votes with 73% of the ballots counted, according to official results from Mexico’s election agency.
Her closest rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate of a coalition of three opposition parties, had 28.4% of the vote and conceded defeat. Jorge Álvarez Máynez, from the center-left Citizen Movement, had 10.6%.
Sheinbaum’s victory was bigger than expected and her margin of roughly 30 points would be the largest in a presidential vote since the 1982 election, when Mexico still was a single-party state. Pre-election polls had given her a 20-point lead.
The vote reflected a resounding show of support for the government of López Obrador, a populist nationalist who won power in 2018 on an anticorruption platform. After taking office, he launched an austerity program for the federal government bureaucracy and redirected spending to welfare programs, especially cash handouts that included students and the elderly, keeping his approval ratings above 60%. López Obrador, who won with 53% of the vote in 2018, was barred by law from re-election.
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