Black presidents sure. Plenty in Africa. And there have been several female prime ministers and a chancellor, but their elections are not entirely based on the popular choice of a leader but the popular choice of a party as well.
Has any country in the world ever elected a female president on her merits alone or would Clinton have been the first ?
http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Presidents.htm
And do you really think she is doing it under her own steam?
I found this:
There seems to have been several since then. There’s a list at the link and a Wikipedia entry under List_Of_Female_Presidents.
As, in many ways, are US Presidential Candidates. They will have been through the Primary process which - to a greater or lesser part - will have effectively seen their “party” select them as a nominee.
So arguably by your own definition Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be a “true” female president either, unless she lost to Obama and won as an Independent.
Wow! San Marino has an impressive number of women on that list.
You’re constraining the issue by specifying the title “President”.
Different countries have different names for their heads of government, and different powers vested in the office of President (e.g. the Irish president has no real power, though there have been two elected female ones) - if they have a president at all.
Thus we in the UK had Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, elected three times as our Prime Minister, but we have never had a president at all - male, female, or small green furry creature from Alpha Centauri.
Though you did have a Lord Protector, who would have been called “President” if his rule over England had taken place 300 years later,
The other issue is that presidents are sometimes figureheads without much real power, such as the President of Ireland. That elective office has been held since 1997 by Mary McAleese. She succeeded Mary Robinson in that post.
Also to my understanding, Vigdís was the first. After her there have been several. In most times it’s hard to say how much of the vote in a particular election has been influenced by the party, or coalition of parties and how much by personal merit. And of course there can be other forces behind an elected politician. I’ll try to give you an example I’m familiar of.
Here in Finland we have had female president elected by popular vote since 2000. She has been elected by popular choice twice, besides 2000 also in 2006. Is Tarja Halonen’s success then the product of her personal merits, or because of the so called party machine? One could say party, since she is the third consecutive president from the Social Democratic Party, SDP’s candidate has won the presidency every time since 1982, despite the party usually getting less than 25% in parliamentary elections. However this has not really been because of some powerful party machine, but more because of right wing candidates’ infighting, and also because of actual personal merits.
Halonen herself had been member of parliament since 1979; after 1987 she was already four years a minister, mainly for social matters. Then in 1995 she became the Foreign minister and held that position until elected president. SDP’s then president Ahtisaari had become unpopular while Halonen was a popular minister so early in 1999 it was decided that she would be party’s new candidate. No primaries etc. were held that time as she was basically the only one really interested. Then the well led EU Council Presidency made the Foreign minister even more popular, and another party, Left Alliance, also gave her its support. So in the first round of elections Halonen already got 40% among seven candidates, and won the second round with 52%, even though SDP and the Left, if put tugether, had got under 34% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections. And as she has been a very popular president, she won the second term with even higher numbers.
Another example here is the first serious female contender for presidency, Elisabeth Rehn, who lost the 1994 election in runoff. But she was the candidate of Swedish People’s Party who normally only get around 5% of the vote in parliamentary elections, and all the large parties each had their own candidates running. Even then Rehn, who was the first female Defense minister, member of parliament since 1979, popular and generally viewed as charismatic and competent, got 22% of the vote in the first round, and lost the second round with 46%. Of course this reflects a very well run campaign, but at least there was no big party machine running it, it was all about personal merit.
Also, like jjimm said, the power is not necessarily held by the person who is called president, and the head of govenment is not necessarily the same as the head of state. Again in Finland, we have an odd semi-presidential system. The old constituency pretty much left undefined the exact powers of president in relation to parliament and prime minister. So while earlier presidents were careful not to get too much power, Kekkonen in 60’s and 70’s took all he legally could, then the SDP presidents gave away most of these powers and now the new constitution limits them anyway. So today prime minister clearly holds more power in practice than the president in Finland.
One more; that the office is named “president” is no reason that the holder has to be elected by popular vote. For example Finland chose the president via electoral college until 1980’s. And this worked independently, unlike the one in the US where electors almost always vote for the guy who got plurality in their state. In our version, people voted for party and other elector lists in their own constituencies, and then the elected electors, everyone free to choose, though parties usually coordinated them, voted for president.
Anyway, of the currently serving female presidents, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner probably have the most actual power. They both got elected by popular vote, though I’d say that only Bachelet won by personal merit while Kirchner’s victory was because of her husband and predecessor’s (these two are the same guy…) support.
The reason i brought this up is because it occured to me that if America chose their leader based on a process more like the parliamentary system, given that Hillary started way ahead with super delegates ( the ones in congress and the senate0, she would be the nominee for the democrats and hence able to present herself to the general public for election to the presidency. She’s failed that however, because unlike her peers, the rank and file think differently. The implication to my mind is that joe blow America and the world still isn’t ready to vote for a female leader.
if you take Thatcher for example, to the best of my knowledge, she became the leader of the Tories by virtue of vote by her peers in the party. When the British voted her party in, she was part of the package. Of course there would be many who voted for the reps and their party as well as her, but her election isn’t based only on a referendum of her being the best leader of the country.
Maggie was more a dictator .
Heil Maggie
That may be true of her style of government, but the actual powers she was able to exercise were the same as those of other prime ministers.
In addition, while (as The Flying Dutchman said) the PM is leader of the majority in the House of Commons, the MPs choose as a leader someone who is (in their view) electable as PM by the general population. This is not all that different from why political parties choose candidates: Clinton, McCain and Obama are all in play because their parties consider them to be “electable” as well as having appropriate policies.
That’s not necessarily true, though the charge of sexism is one that the Clinton campaign and supporters have thrown many, many times. But I don’t think it’s a matter of the US not being ready for a female president. I think it’s just a matter of people rejecting Hillary Clinton, because she’s Hillary Clinton, not because she’s a woman. A different woman, one who isn’t such a huge bogieperson to so much of the electorate and who hasn’t run such a nasty, inept campaign, could very well find herself president soon (within the next 20 years, at least).
Fair point - ostensibly British Parliamentary Democracy (in its current state) is more about the populace approving the party that they feel will best govern, rather than the person.
That said, if “the people” didn’t want a particular individual as Prime Minister then winning a General Election would be incredibly tricky for that person to do so - woman or not.
(bolding mine)
Not quite - because you’re equating the “Parliamentary” side of things with the “Primary.” By doing that you’re making an assumption that there isn’t an equivalent step in the Parliamentary process - which there is (within the UK sense anyway).
To use the UK system as an example again, your mental hypothetical is (in this context):
Which isn’t actually what happens - because the parties will almost always have chosen their leaders before a General Election, in most cases by polling all party members - not just MPs.
Which means we basically have a direct equivalent to the primary process here, you just won’t have seen anything about it - it’s less ‘Hollywood’ than yours. 
This doesn’t actually mean that Thatcher warrants the title of “First Female President”, by the way, because the “polling the whole party” thing was only adopted by the Tories (her party) relatively recently, but what it does do is demonstrate that maybe the difference between the influence the general public (or party rank and file) have on a US Presidential candidate, and that which they have on the election of a UK Prime Minister isn’t quite so big as you think.
Ultimately, however, i think the question in your OP is flawed. Basically what you’re really asking is:
“What country which has damn-near-enough exactly the same political process and setup as the USA has already elected a female President?”
Which is a fair question, but is it a question that actually yields a useful answer? I say this because it’s tight enough (criteria-wise) to eliminates a vast number of women who were fairly elected to power in various countries where, if their sex had been an issue, it would have been incredibly easy for voters to have kept them out of supreme office.
Basically you’ve just done a google search with a phrase in quotation marks - yeah, you’re gonna get some answers, but removing those quotation marks might get you some better (or at least more interesting) results
No, if we had a parliamentary system then Nancy Pelosi would be Prime Minister.
If the US had a parliamentary system, then people with ambitions to become prime minister would become members of the House of Representatives, Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama probably would not be senators, and Hillary Clinton might be majority leader in the House and hence prime minister.
And George W. Bush would be a queen.
GOD, no!
Yes, Laura might be disappointed.
But seriously, you can have a parliamentary system in a republic. Ireland has such a system, and Australia seriously considered such a system about 9 years ago. So George W. Bush might still be president.
But with no power at all.
::sigh::
I’m surprised both Indira Ghandi and Benazir Bhutto haven’t even been mentioned, as far as I can see. They are both ex-Prime Ministers, and there are a lot of issues in both cases about the elections, but all the same, two female heads of state right there.