Mexico's New President is a Woman

A Jewish woman, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, will now be leading a major country.

I’m proud of my adopted country today!

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the leader of the ruling left-wing Morena party, is the first woman to be elected to the office of President of Mexico. Despite some misinformation in the media, she will not actually be the first Jewish president, as former Presidents Salinas de Gortari and Plutarco Elías Calle were also of Jewish background (though none of them made, or in the case of Sheinbaum make, a point of identifying as Jewish). Sheinbaum is the former Head of Government of Mexico City (which, with its 30 million inhabitants, is bigger and more diverse than many countries), a position equivalent to that of a state governor. She studied physics as an undergraduate, holds a Ph.D in energy engineering, and was part of a United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Sheinbaum’s impressive educational, professional and political credentials all go to show how much better qualified a woman generally has to be than a man to achieve high political office.

It’s worth mentioning that Sheinbaum’s main rival in yesterday’s election, Xóchitl Gálvez — a businesswoman and senator who leads a left-right coalition — is the daughter of an indigenous Otomí father and a mixed-race mother. So it was virtually guaranteed that Mexican voters were going to make history and elect a female president from a minority background.

Of course, just because a woman holds the highest political office in the land does not mean that things will necessarily get better for women — in a country that is famously dangerous for women. But Sheinbaum’s election still represents real progress, in a “macho” country that at least in this sense is far ahead of the United States (which, after all, elected a failed businessman, pathological liar, racist, sexual predator and Russian puppet to the presidency in 2016 rather than voting in an extraordinarily qualified woman).

¡Viva México!

P.S. To learn more about Claudia Sheinbaum, I recommend this profile in Politico, “Claudia Sheinbaum Will Be Mexico’s Next President. But Which Version of Her Will Govern?” by José Luis Sabau.