MEXICO is likely to get its first female president after the two top parties both chose women to spearhead their campaigns for next year’s election.

Yesterday the Mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, was selected as the country’s ruling party candidate for next June’s election.

It is the first time that two women from Mexico’s main political movements will compete for the presidency.

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

Last night, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, affectionately known as Amlo, announced that Ms Sheinbaum had defeated her five male internal rivals within the Moreno Party to replace him. 

Amlo has put women in important positions in his cabinet and been a mentor for Ms Sheinbaum.

Morena controls 22 of Mexico’s 32 states and Mr Lopez Obrador remains highly popular, giving Ms Sheinbaum a strong advantage. 

But Ms Galvez emerged from virtual obscurity, helped largely by daily public criticism from Amlo, to become the consensus candidate of the largely directionless opposition.

Ms Galvez will represent the Broad Front for Mexico, a coalition of the conservative National Action Party, the small Democratic Revolution Party, and the old-guard Institutional Revolutionary Party that held Mexico’s presidency without interruption between 1929 and 2000.

The announcement of women heading the presidential field candidates came on the same day as a Mexican supreme court ruled that abortion be removed from the federal penal code, and will require the federal public health service and all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.

That will mean access to abortion for millions of Mexicans. 

“Today is a day of victory and justice for Mexican women!” Mexico’s National Institute for Women wrote in a message on the social media platform X.