Mexico votes this Sunday for major general elections. The former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling party, has every chance of winning the presidential election against her rival Xochitl Galvez, at the head of a right-wing coalition. Portrait.
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“ She is a very well prepared person, she did very good things in Mexico », Says Angie Belites, a supporter from the capital. “ She will be the best president of modern times, equal toAndres Manuel Lopez Obrador [l’actuel président] », Supports Roberto Rodrigez, his arms outstretched to raise a banner bearing the image of his candidate above the crowd during his last meeting. “ Above all, she’s a woman! », exclaims Maria García. This school teacher hopes a lot from the election of “ Doctor Claudia Sheinbaum “.
Candidate of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), “Claudia” as her supporters call her, is indeed very well placed to become the first female president of the Mexican Republic. She ended her campaign on Wednesday, in front of 500,000 people in the capital’s Zócalo square, where dozens of giant screens projected her silhouette dressed in burgundy, the color of Morena, into the surrounding streets. She delivered a slow and confident speech, promising victory on June 2, as she always did throughout a very well-controlled campaign.
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From the IPCC to Mexico City Hall
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is, above all, a great career in science. After attending the University of Berkeley in California, she graduated in physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and has a doctorate in energy engineering.
A university professor on the issue of renewable energies, recognized for her work, in 2007 she joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She participated in writing a report alongside 600 researchers the same year that the organization was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
Born in Mexico City in 1962, Claudia Sheinbaum comes from an intellectual Jewish family with strong left-wing roots. Both of his parents are scientists. His grandparents, of Bulgarian and Lithuanian descent, emigrated to Mexico during the 1920s and 1940s. In an activist film titled Claudia, the documentary, released at the start of her campaign and directed by Rodrigo Imaz, son of her first husband, Claudia Sheinbaum says she grew up between politics and academia. In 1968, his mother Annie Pardo, a biology professor, participated in university demonstrations whose repression left more than 300 dead.
At the end of the 1980s, Claudia Sheinbaum took her first steps in activism within student movements that opposed the government’s neoliberal policies. But she truly embraced her career in politics when she joined Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his accession to mayor of Mexico City in 2000. She then became the environment secretary of the federal district. Alongside AMLO, she participated in the founding of the Morena party and briefly held a position in Tlalpan’s delegation in Mexico.
Then in 2018, while López Obrador launched the presidential race, Sheinbaum ran for mayor of Mexico City, and became the first woman to occupy the position of head of government of the capital.
In AMLO’s footsteps
It is at the origin of major projects in the city, particularly in the mobility sector. It thus inaugurates several Metrobus lines and a cable car to the east of the city, connecting working-class neighborhoods. But his mandate is also marked by the tragedy of the accident on metro line 12 in 2022 and the difficult management of the pandemic. During her campaign for the presidential election, Claudia Sheinbaum readily highlighted her positive results in the capital in terms of security, claiming, for example, to have succeeded in reducing the number of homicides there.
At the end of her party’s primary which nominated her as candidate, the president gave her the “leader’s baton”, a traditional scepter which symbolizes the succession at the head of Morena. Since then, she has promised, on the national level this time, to continue without deviating the transformation of the country initiated by her mentor.
“ The big question is whether she will have the autonomy and leadership capabilities to continue this movement with as much political success “, explains political scientist Jorge Zepeda. It is also a question of knowing whether it will be able to gain independence on certain subjects such as security, the great failure of AMLO’s policy which bet on the militarization of the country.
The candidate is also expected on the environmental issue because current policy has until now focused on fossil fuels. For Jorge Zepeda, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has a personality “ quite categorical and very firm ”, will reveal itself once elected president. Nevertheless, he anticipates that “ “she will have a very different style of presidency from that of López Obrador, less focused on ideological activism and more oriented toward the modern left.”