Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, on Monday won a landslide electoral victory to become Mexico's new president and the country's first woman head of state. An environmental scientist and experienced left-wing politician, she is known for keeping a cool head in times of crisis.
Sheinbaum won between 58.3% and 60.7% of the vote, according to the National Electoral Institute’s president, while opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez won between 26.6% and 28.6% and Jorge Alvarez Maynez won between 9.9% and 10.8%.
Sheinbaum's Morena party was also projected to hold its majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The granddaughter of Bulgarian and Lithuanian Jewish migrants, Sheinbaum is a close ally of outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Unlike her mentor, however, the 61-year-old is "not a populist", said Pamela Starr, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.
"She is much more of a mainstream leftist politician," and likely to be "less ideological" than the outgoing president, Starr added.
Activist roots
Sheinbaum was born in Mexico City to parents caught up in the turmoil of the early 1960s, when students and other activists were seeking to end the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) long grip on power in Mexico.
"At home, we talked about politics morning, noon and night," Sheinbaum was quoted as saying in a recent biography.
In the 1980s, the future environmental scientist studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she defended her bachelor’s thesis on the energy effiency of wood-fired ovens. She sometimes went with friends to install more efficient cooking systems in particularly poor regions of Mexico such as Michoacan.
Guillermo Robles, a former university classmate, told AFP that Sheinbaum's magnetism as a young woman lay in her left-wing political convictions. "She never said 'I can't'. She always went, especially to the rallies," he said.
As a student, the projected president-elect “helped lead a movement protesting a plan to raise fees” at the university, reported the New York Times.
Sheinbaum did doctoral research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where she studied energy use in Mexico, according to the Wilson Center.
She has published more than 20 scientific articles on energy efficiency, a topic she wrote about as part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007, the year that the IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize.
‘Making decisions’
Sheinbaum served as Mexico City’s environment minister in the early 2000s under then mayor Lopez Obrador, who became her political mentor. After his 2006 presidential election loss, she taught classes at her alma mater and “conducted research on engineering challenges in Mexico City, specifically on water and mobility”, according to the Wilson Center.
Sheinbaum was elected mayor of the city’s largest borough, Tlalpan, in 2015. An earthquake two years later caused the borough’s Rebsamen school to collapse, leading to the deaths of 19 children and seven teachers. Sheinbaum denied that her office was responsible for negligence concerning building permits.
Despite the incident, she was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2018. The collapse of a metro line there as a train passed on May 3, 2021 killed 27 people and injured 79. Sheinbaum rejected accusations that budget cuts were to blame for the accident, which was caused by obvious construction defects. She negotiated with the construction company, owned by magnate Carlos Slim, that built the line to obtain compensation for victims and avoid lawsuits.
"Governing is about making decisions. You have to make a decision and assume the pressures that can come from it," Sheinbaum said, according to AFP.
‘Being a scientist is an advantage’
While her mentor Lopez Obrador is known for the daily 7am press conferences he held during his presidency, Sheinbaum was an even earlier riser as Mexico City’s mayor. Three times a week at 6am sharp in a large room at City Hall, she would welcome residents who had lined up to tell her about their problems: noisy neighbourhood bars, administrative issues with pensions, public art projects, roads in need of repair. There was no filter for those who wanted an audience: all they had to do was turn up early enough to get one of the tens of “fichas” (appointments) distributed every day, reported FRANCE 24’s Laurence Cuvillier.
During the appointments, Sheinbaum listened, took notes, redirected people to her specialists or, if necessary, woke up civil servants by phone if it turned out they had not done their jobs correctly. Her focused observation of the city and direct contact with its inhabitants discreetly consolidated her reputation as a hard worker and as a humanist.
“Scientists have this quality of being trained to find the causes of a problem, and to find effective solutions,” Sheinbaum said in an interview with FRANCE 24 in 2019. “In that sense, I think being a scientist is an advantage – as much for socially oriented projects as for governance and administration. And I think there needs to be a connection between science and the political decision-making processes.”
‘This is Claudia’
In 2022, slogans and decals started to cover the walls of even the most isolated, sun-drenched villages in Mexico, proclaiming “Es Claudia” (This is Claudia) to help build a national image for a woman who had only played a political role in the nation's capital.
During a series of heated debates in the presidential campaign, an unflappable Sheinbaum avoided looking at her main opponent Galvez or even calling her by name, despite a barrage of accusations.
Galvez, an opposition candidate with Indigenous roots, branded Sheinbaum "cold and heartless", saying she lacked sympathy for child cancer patients and earthquake victims.
"I would call you the ice lady," Galvez said.
In her concession speech on Sunday, Galvez said: “I want to stress that my recognition (of Sheinbaum's victory) comes with a firm demand for results and solutions to the country's serious problems.”
Lopez Obrador congratulated Sheinbaum, a member of his ruling Morena party, with "all my affection and respect" for her projected win.
After casting her ballot, Sheinbaum revealed she had not voted for herself but for a 93-year-old veteran leftist, Ifigenia Martinez, in recognition of her struggle.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
