Mexico

HERMOSILLO, Mexico — When Claudia Pavlovich ran for governor of Sonora, a vast swath of cowboy country south of Arizona, not a single Mexican state was led by a woman. Fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s mayors were female. And the hot issue of that 2015 campaign wasn’t Pavlovich’s political platform. It was her lack of wrinkles.

Women were poised to win a record number of state governors’ offices in Mexican mid-term elections on Sunday, capturing territory long dominated by men and giving them a bigger political platform to reach the presidency one day.

Preliminary tallies by electoral authorities on Monday showed female candidates securing six of the 15 regional bastions on offer, just two shy of the total number of women ever elected to lead regional governments in Mexico's history.

By Oscar López,

Statement by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director

Date: Thursday, July 26, 2018

Mexico's hard swing to the left in this month's national elections also swept in some other historic firsts. Women won key positions across the country, including, for the first time ever, the mayor of Mexico City.

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, 56, will assume arguably the second most important political post in Mexico, after capturing nearly 50 percent of the vote in the July 1 elections.

Last Sunday’s elections in Mexico resulted in gender parity in the Parliament: with almost all the results counted, there are 246 women (48.6%) and 254 men (51.2%) in the Chamber of Deputies and 65 women (50.78%) and 63 men (49.22%) in the Senate. A provisional IPU calculation shows that Mexico has moved up from 9th to 4th place in the world ranking of women in parliament.

The 56-year-old had served as environmental secretary under Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador when he was mayor. With Obrador confirmed as winner of the presidential election, it's the first time the two roles have been taken by members of the same party.

In 2014, Sheinbaum left the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and joined Lopez Obrador’s Moreno Party.