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Mexico’s Pick! Claudia Sheinbaum For President, First Woman to hold the Job! Claudia Sheinbaum addresses her supporters after winning the Mexican presidential election, in Mexico City on June 3, 2024. Photo by Raquel Cunha/Reuters

Who Is Claudia Sheinbaum? Here’s What To Know About Mexico’s Next President

— World | June 3, 2024

Mexico City (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum, Who will be Mexico’s First Woman Leader in the Nation’s more than 200 Years of Independence, Captured the Presidency by Promising Continuity.

The 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist ran a disciplined campaign capitalizing on her predecessor’s popularity before emerging victorious in Sunday’s vote, according to an official quick count. But with her victory now in hand, Mexicans will look to see how Sheinbaum, a very different personality from mentor and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will assert herself.

While she hewed close to López Obrador politically and shares many of his ideas about the government’s role in addressing inequality, she is viewed as less combative and more data-driven.

Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, “I believe in science.”

Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.

While the federal government was downplaying the importance of coronavirus testing, Mexico City expanded its testing regimen. Sheinbaum set limits on businesses’ hours and capacity when the virus was rapidly spreading, even though López Obrador wanted to avoid any measures that would hurt the economy. And she publicly wore protective masks and urged social distancing while the president was still lunging into crowds.

Mexico’s persistently high levels of violence will be one of her most immediate challenges after she takes office Oct. 1. On the campaign trail she said little more than that she would expand the quasi-military National Guard created by López Obrador and continue his strategy of targeting social ills that make so many young Mexicans easy targets for cartel recruitment.

“Let it be clear, it doesn’t mean an iron fist, wars or authoritarianism,” Sheinbaum said of her approach to tackling criminal gangs, during her final campaign event. “We will promote a strategy of addressing the causes and continue moving toward zero impunity.”

Sheinbaum has praised López Obrador profusely and said little that the president hasn’t said himself. She blamed neoliberal economic policies for condemning millions to poverty, promised a strong welfare state and praised Mexico’s large state-owned oil company, Pemex, while also promising to emphasize clean energy.

“For me, being from the left has to do with that, with guaranteeing the minimum rights to all residents,” Sheinbaum told the AP last year.

In contrast to López Obrador, who seemed to relish his highly public battles with other branches of the government and also the news media, Sheinbaum is expected by many observers to be less combative or at least more selective in picking her fights.

“It appears she’s going to go in a different direction,” said Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a political scientist at Iberoamerican University. “I don’t know how much.”

Sheinbaum will also be the first person from a Jewish background to lead the overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the Presidential candidate of the ruling MORENA Party, reacts as she addresses her supporters after winning the election, in Mexico City on June 3, 2024. Photo by Raquel Cunha/Reuters

Claudia Sheinbaum claimed victory in Mexico’s presidential election, becoming the first woman selected for the job by promising to continue the political course set by her populist predecessor despite widespread discontent with persistent cartel violence and disappointing economic performance.

The climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor was the favored successor of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But her cool temper offers a sharp contrast in style — and a break with Mexico’s male-dominated political culture.

Sheinbaum said Sunday night that her two competitors had called her and conceded in an election that guaranteed Mexico would make history. The two leading candidates were women, and Sheinbaum is also be the first person from a Jewish background to lead the overwhelmingly Catholic country. Her main competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, meanwhile, had a father who was Indigenous Otomi.

“I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters,” Sheinbaum said with a smile, speaking at a downtown hotel shortly after electoral authorities announced an early count showed she held an irreversible lead.

The 61-year-old Sheinbaum led the campaign wire-to-wire despite a spirited challenge from Gálvez. But Sheinbaum is unlikely to enjoy the kind of unquestioning devotion that López Obrador has enjoyed.

Yoselin Ramírez, 29, said she voted for Sheinbaum, but split her vote for other posts because she didn’t want anyone holding a strong majority.

“I don’t want everything to be occupied by the same party, so there can be a little more equality,” she said without elaborating.

The main opposition candidate, Gálvez, who rose from selling snacks on the street in her poor hometown to start her own tech firms, tried to seize on Mexicans’ concerns about security and promised to take a more aggressive approach toward organized crime.

By Monday morning, with the 76.1% of the polling place tallies counted by Mexico’s electoral authority, Sheinbaum had 58.6% of the vote, followed by Gálvez with 28.3%. Longshot candidate Jorge Álvarez Máynez trailed with 10.5% of the vote. Sheinbaum’s Morena party was also projected to hold its majorities in both chambers of Congress.

If the margin holds, it would approach López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. He won the presidency after two unsuccessful tries with 53.2% of the votes, in a three-way race where National Action took 22.3% and the Institutional Revolutionary Party took 16.5%.

The elections were widely seen as a referendum on López Obrador, who has expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce cartel violence in Mexico.

In Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zocalo, Sheinbaum’s lead did not draw the kind of cheering, jubilant crowds that greeted López Obrador’s victory in 2018. Those present were enthusiastic, but comparatively few in number.

Supporters of Claudia Sheinbaum cheer after the first results showed her leading by a large margin. Photograph: Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images

Sara Ríos, 76, a retired literature professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, celebrated after hearing that Gálvez had conceded.

“The only way that we move forward is by working together,” Ríos said. “She is going to work to bring peace to the country, and is going to manage to advance, but it is a slow process.”

Earlier, Fernando Fernández, a chef, 28, joined the relatively small crowd, hoping for a Sheinbaum victory, but even he acknowledged there were problems.

“You vote for Claudia out of conviction, for AMLO,” Fernández said, referring to López Obrador by his initials, as most Mexicans do.

But his highest hope is that Sheinbaum can “improve what AMLO couldn’t do, the price of gasoline, crime and drug trafficking, which he didn’t combat even though he had the power.”

Sheinbaum promised to continue all of López Obrador’s policies, including a universal pension for the elderly and a program that pays youths to apprentice.

Gálvez, who ran with a coalition of major opposition parties, left the Senate last year to focus her ire on López Obrador’s decision to avoid confronting the drug cartels through his “hugs not bullets” policy. She pledged to more aggressively go after criminals.

Julio García, a Mexico City office worker, said he was voting for the opposition in Mexico City’s central San Rafael neighborhood. “They’ve robbed me twice at gunpoint. You have to change direction, change leadership,” the 34-year-old said. “Continuing the same way, we’re going to become Venezuela.”

López Obrador claims to have reduced historically high homicide levels by 20% since he took office in December 2018. But that’s largely a claim based on a questionable reading of statistics. The real homicide rate appears to have declined by only about 4% in six years.

In Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s largest borough, Angelina Jiménez, a 76-year-old homemaker, said she came to vote “to end this inept government that says we’re doing well and (still) there are so many dead.”

She said the violence plaguing Mexico really worried her so she planned to vote for Gálvez and her promise to take on the cartels. López Obrador “says we’re better and it’s not true. We’re worse.”

Left: A 2022 protest against gender violence and femicide in Mexico City, Mexico. File photo by Raquel Cunha/Reuters

These Are The Pressing Gender-Related Issues Facing Mexico’s Mext President

Claudia Sheinbaum’s name will go down in Mexican history. The governing party candidate won Mexico’s presidential election on Sunday, a turning point in a mostly conservative nation that for more than two centuries has been exclusively ruled by men.

Elsewhere in Latin America, women have led countries including Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Guyana, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Haiti and Costa Rica.

Mexican women won the right to vote in 1953. No law prevented female candidates from holding office, but sexism and “macho” culture continue to permeate the country of 129 million people.

Prior to the current presidential race, during which Sheinbaum maintained a comfortable lead against opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, only two women had officially sought Mexico’s presidency. Both failed.

In her bid to replace outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum struggled to construct an image of her own, leaving many wondering whether she can escape the shadow of her mentor.

Women currently lead some key Mexican institutions, such as the Senate, the Supreme Court and the National Electoral Institute. Mexico ranks third among Latin American nations with the most women in the national Cabinet — 44 percent — and has 10 female governors among its 32 states.

In some Indigenous villages, though, men still hold the power. Among the issues that Mexican women face are femicide, or women killed because of their gender, a gender employment gap and inadequate policies guaranteeing sexual and reproductive rights. Sheinbaum, 61, will need to address these after she takes office on Oct. 1.

Here’s A Look At The Issues:

Femicide And Gender Violence

Demonstrations on International Women’s Day on March 8 are painful reminders that many Mexican women disappear or are killed on a daily basis. According to U.N. Women, up to 10 women are victims of femicide each day in Mexico. The number totaled 3,000 in 2023. Thousands more have disappeared. In many cases, it is their mothers, feeling abandoned by the government, who have taken on the task of searching for them.

Most femicides go unpunished due to Mexico’s inefficient justice system, which frequently dismisses reported crimes or fails to properly investigate and prosecute them. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, more than 40 percent of Mexican women who are 15 years old or older say they have been victims of some sort of violence in their lives.

During her campaign, Sheinbaum said she would replicate measures against gender-based violence that were implemented when she was mayor of the capital. They include the creation of an anti-femicide prosecutor’s office and legislation that would force offenders to leave their homes.

“We transform, we are warriors who open paths for other women,” Sheinbaum said.

In spite of this, Sheinbaum has been criticized by feminists and activists arguing that her government lacked gender-related policies. Excessive use of force against women during demonstrations has been flagged as well.

Sexual And Reproductive Rights

Teenage pregnancy in Mexico has raised concern. According to official figures from 2021, the latest available, there were 147,279 births among adolescents between 15 and 19 years old, and 3,019 among girls under 15.

Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that national laws prohibiting abortions are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights, but further state-by-state legal work is pending to remove all penalties.

Twelve of Mexico’s 32 states have decriminalized abortion, most of them in the past five years. A few more states allow abortion if the mother’s life is in danger, and it is legal nationwide if the pregnancy is the result of rape.

In most states where it has been decriminalized, advocates say they face persistent challenges in making abortion safe, accessible and government funded. Sheinbaum did not address the topic during her campaign.

Gender Employment Gap

According to official figures, 76 percent of Mexican men and only 47 percent of women are employed.

Among working women, 54 percent have informal jobs and they dedicate close to 43 hours per week to household chores. According to the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, this limits the time that women can devote to the labor market. Education and access to public transportation are determining factors as well.

Women usually earn less money than men. In Mexico City, the difference is 6 percent, while in other states the gap can reach up to 25 percent.

#Mexico 🇲🇽#Mexico’s Elections #New President #President Elect | Claudia Sheinbaum #NPR.ORG #Associated Press

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