Claudia Sheinbaum has been elected Mexico’s first-ever female president in a historic result.

Dr Sheinbaum, 61, an engineer and former mayor of Mexico City, of outgoing president Andres Manuel López Obrador’s leftist Morena party, had been consistently leading her nearest rival Xochitl Gálvez, a centre-Right senator and businesswoman, by around 20 points in polls.

“I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Dr Sheinbaum said with a smile, speaking at a downtown hotel shortly after electoral authorities announced a statistical sample showed she held an irreversible lead.

“We have demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections,” she added after her two rivals conceded her victory.

Mexicans cast their votes on Sunday in the country’s largest-ever elections, which were marred by violence.

A total of 38 candidates have been killed during the campaign and at least a similar number of party workers also slain as the drug cartels made their presence felt. Two people were killed at voting stations in the central state of Puebla on Sunday.

The elections have been widely hailed as historic, and not just because nearly 20,000 public posts, including all 629 seats in congress along with the presidency, in a system that bestows huge powers on the president during their single six-year term, were at stake.

Autocratic tendencies

Yet the elections have also underscored the advances of the drug cartels under Mr López Obrador. He promised to tamp down the country’s savage drugs war and instead address the social and economic root causes of organised crime.

Instead, he has presided over more deaths at the hands of the cartels than any other Mexican president, with some parts of the national territory turning into no-go zones for security forces – unless they go in in force, heavily armed and in large numbers.

His autocratic tendencies – including undermining the electoral agency and regularly attacking journalists by name in a country where dozens of media workers have been killed in recent years – have also united the opposition against him.

Ms Gálvez represented an electoral alliance of highly unusual bedfellows who previously were diehard political enemies. They include the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, the conservative National Action Party, and the politically amorphous Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000 – including by often rigging elections.

It remains to be seen if Dr Sheinbaum will continue Mr López Obrador’s policies and polarising personal style, or whether she will seek to establish a softer image and be more open to dialogue with her political opponents.