Mexico likely to get first female president after top parties choose 2 women as candidates

With the selection of former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum as the candidate of the country's ruling party in next June's election, Mexico will for the first time have time two women from its main political movements competing for the presidency.

Sheinbaum, as well as the opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, have insisted that Mexico is ready to be led by a woman, but it will not be an easy path.

On Wednesday night, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's Morena party announced that Sheinbaum had defeated five internal party rivals - all men. López Obrador has put women in important positions in his Cabinet and been a mentor for Sheinbaum, even while being accused at times of male chauvinism.

Mexico still has famously intense "machismo" or male chauvinism, expressed in its most extreme form in a high rate of femicides, but also daily in hundreds of more subtle ways.

Mexico has a strong "macho vote," said Gloria Alcocer Olmos, director of the electoral magazine "Voice and Vote," adding that it is not exclusive to male voters.

Alcocer Olmos noted that in June's gubernatorial election in the state of Mexico - the country's most populous jurisdiction - the race was between two female candidates "and turnout was the lowest in history." The same thing occurred in the state election in Aguascalientes in 2021, she said.

"What does that tell us?" she asked. "That the people are voting for women? The reality is that no, and the saddest thing is that women themselves are not voting for women."

Such low turnout in the June 2 presidential election is less likely because so much is at stake, Alcocer Olmos said. There is also the possibility that the Citizen Movement party, which controls Nuevo Leon and Jalisco - two of the...