BBC
From the moment former Mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum threw her hat in the ring for the presidency, the result was rarely in doubt.
Throughout the long and often gruelling campaign, as she criss-crossed the nation on commercial flights, her double-digit lead in the polls would have reassured her that she was on track to make history.
She has now done so, becoming Mexico’s first woman president by a huge margin.
It is a watershed moment both for Mexico and her personally. She has already served as Mexico City’s first female mayor. Now, in a few months, she will occupy the National Palace, succeeding her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known by his initials, Amlo.
No matter what else happens in her political career or where her six years in power lead her, she will always be the woman who managed to break the glass ceiling in Mexican politics. Given the country’s deeply ingrained patriarchy and entrenched machismo, that is no small feat.
Yet once the campaign leaflets are binned and the billboards bearing her face taken down, Mexicans could be forgiven for wondering exactly what kind of president she will be. In a campaign so full of words and speeches, there was precious little policy detail and few specifics about governance.
On the stump, she often repeated her basic premise: that she would build the “second floor” of the “Fourth Transformation” – that is, the political project of her ally, Mr López Obrador.
President López Obrador and his supporters call it the “Fourth Transformation” or “4T” because they put his movement on a par with three transformative moments in Mexican history: Independence in 1810, the Reform War (and separation of church and state) of 1858 and the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
