Meet Xóchitl Gálvez, the Second Woman Running to Become Mexico’s First-Ever Woman President

By this time next year, Mexico will likely be led by its first-ever woman president. The country’s two main political parties have both chosen women as their presidential nominees as the governing National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) party will be represented by Claudia Sheinbaum, a Jewish former mayor of Mexico City. And the other big political party Frente Amplio por México (Broad Front for Mexico) has selected an engineer and senator Xóchitl Gálvez, as their candidate.

Sheinbaum is an ally of current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Most people believe if elected, Sheinbaum will continue in the footsteps of López Obrador and follow through with many of his projects. “There’s no turning back from the transformation begun by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,” Sheinbaum said while campaigning last month in Mexico City.

As part of the opposition party, Gálvez has criticized López Obrador for the violence in Mexico and has said that “ovaries are needed” to solve the problem of organized crime plaguing the country. “This is just the beginning,” Gálvez said on social media. “Nobody will stop us.”

Gálvez herself has also been criticized for claiming to be Indigenous. Irma Juan Carlos, a member of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies recently gave a speech where she called Gálvez “an impostor, a usurper, a liar, a hypocrite and a scoundrel, you are not indigenous, you do not know what it is to suffer.”

The new candidate has responded to these criticisms before, claiming that her family on her father’s side was Indigenous and that no one gets to choose who they are besides the person in question. 

On the election side of things, women’s rights activist Maricruz Ocampo described the matchup between Sheinbaum and Gálvez as a “feminist’s dream” and said the 2024 presidential race “is going to signify a turn in the way that we see women in politics.”

Current polls show Claudia Sheinbaum with a healthy 17-point lead against Xóchitl  Gálvez, 44% to 27%. That, of course, can change over the next nine months. The vote for Mexico’s new president will take place on June 2, 2024.