Looking to become Mexico’s first female and Jewish President, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced Monday she will be resigning from her post this Friday to pursue the ruling party’s nomination for the upcoming 2024 presidential election. 

If victorious, she’d be the first female president with Latin America’s second largest economy, following Brazil. 

“I make this decision because I consider that I am the only person who will be in the survey who comes from a scientific career and who, at the same time, has participated in the fight for the rights of the people of Mexico, democracy, freedoms, social justice and environmental, since I was only 15 years old,” Sheinbaum wrote in a tweet. 

“I also take into consideration that I am the only woman who participates in this unprecedented process,” she added. “There will be no work or commitment that is not fulfilled in its entirety, of that you can be completely certain. I give you my word.

The politician and engineer is one of two favorites alongside Marcelo Ebrard, the foreign minister who’d announced earlier that same Monday he’d be resigning to run, in the internal selection process to succeed as leader of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena). The winner will be announced on Sept. 6. 

AMLO is unable to seek re-election due to the nation’s law that restricts leaders to a single six-year term. The party is favored to take back-to-back victories in the June 2024 presidential election. 

“The early polls that have been carried out put us in first place and I am sure it will stay this way,” Sheinbaum said Monday during her press conference. 

She emphasized her career as a scientist and environmentalist, saying she looks to continue AMLO’s “transformation” of Mexico with her “own stamp.”

“I have made the decision to leave the post definitively on June 16, with the goal of becoming the first woman in the history of Mexico to lead the fate of the nation,” she said.

"It's time for women," Sheinbaum continued.

Sheinbaum was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her father's parents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s while her mother’s parents emigrated there from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust. 

Following in the same career footsteps, her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, is a biologist and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and her father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, is a chemical engineer. 

Sheinbaum was the local Secretary of the Environment under the mayoralty of AMLO between 2000 and 2006. 

From the end of 2015, she served as the Mayor of Tlalpan. She has served as Mayor of Mexico City, or Head of Government which is equivalent to a state governor, since 2018. 

She was elected as the candidate of the leftist Juntos Haremos Historia coalition, and was the first Jewish woman to hold the position.