• Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, won a landslide electoral victory to become Mexico’s new President and the country’s first woman head of state. 

• Mexicans voted on June 2 in a presidential election dominated by two women – a historic first in a country with a history of gender-based violence and discrimination.

• Sheinbaum won nearly 60 per cent of the votes, while opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez won nearly 28 per cent and Jorge Alvarez Maynez won about 10 per cent.

• Sheinbaum, 61, represents the ruling Morena party and will succeed outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

• She will start her six-year tenure as Mexican President on October 1.

A scientist and former Mexico City mayor

• Sheinbaum was born on June 24, 1962, in Mexico City.

• Sheinbaum was born to parents caught up in the turmoil of the early 1960s, when students and other activists were seeking to end the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) long grip on power in Mexico.

• She is a close ally of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

• Sheinbaum did doctoral research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where she studied energy use in Mexico.

• She has published more than 20 scientific articles on energy efficiency, a topic she wrote about as part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, the year that the IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize.

• She launched her political career in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then-Mexico City’s newly elected mayor, tapped her to be his environmental chief, tasked with improving the smoggy capital’s air quality, highways and public transport.

• Sheinbaum served as the chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador’s first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.

• Sheinbaum was elected mayor of the city’s largest borough, Tlalpan, in 2015. An earthquake two years later caused the borough’s Rebsamen school to collapse, leading to the deaths of 19 children and seven teachers. Sheinbaum denied that her office was responsible for negligence concerning building permits.

• In 2018, Sheinbaum made history as Mexico City’s first elected woman mayor.

• The collapse of a metro line there as a train passed on May 3, 2021 killed 27 people and injured 79. Sheinbaum rejected accusations that budget cuts were to blame for the accident, which was caused by obvious construction defects.

• Until she stepped down last year to run for President, Sheinbaum was known as a data-driven manager, winning plaudits for reducing the megacity’s homicide rate by half, by boosting security spending on an expanded police force with higher salaries.

• Sheinbaum was the clear frontrunner in the contest to succeed outgoing President Lopez Obrador.

• Among the new President’s challenges will be tense negotiations with the United States over the huge flows of US-bound migrants crossing Mexico and security cooperation over drug trafficking at a time when the US fentanyl epidemic rages.

• A top economic challenge will be whether Sheinbaum will have the money to continue her predecessor’s popular social programmes, considering the government has a big deficit of almost 6 per cent that the Treasury has vowed to reduce.

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