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Claudia Sheinbaum

Mexico has elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of the capital, as the country’s first female president after a heated election on Sunday, with the nation’s top election authority projecting a comfortable win for the 61-year-old physicist-turned-politician. Claudia Sheinbaum is a prominent Mexican politician and scientist who has gained significant recognition in recent years. Sheinbaum, a protege of Mexico’s outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is a member of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), the political party founded by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

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.

Sheinbaum was born on June 24, 1962 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. Sheinbaum grew up in a family deeply engaged in activism, and her involvement began from a young age. At 15, she volunteered to assist groups of mothers searching for their missing children, while in the 1980s she also joined protests against state intervention in education policies.

Sheinbaum is recognized for her scientific background, which is somewhat unusual in the political landscape. 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, she “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.

Sheinbaum served as Mexico City’s environment minister from 2000 to 2006 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 became the first woman to be elected as the Head of Government of Mexico City in 2018, a position equivalent to the city's mayor. 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.

Sheinbaum has been noted for her focus on sustainability, environmental policies, and urban development. She has worked on initiatives to improve public transportation, reduce pollution, and enhance social programs in Mexico City. Her administration has also dealt with significant challenges, including managing the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world.

"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. 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.”

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.

Sheinbaum struggled to establish her identity in this campaign while under AMLO’s influence. While trying to convince Mexicans to vote for her, she has adhered closely to his policies, while also trying to assert her individuality. To many, Mexico’s first female president remains somewhat a mystery. “It’s complicated,” Juan Pablo Micozzi, an associate professor of political science at Mexico’s Autonomous Institute of Technology (ITAM), told Al Jazeera. “Her [political] trajectory has been practically an unconditional alignment with AMLO … So, it’s really hard for me to understand what Claudia is going to do on day one without AMLO in charge,” Micozzi added.

Some social media users asserted that the former Mexico City mayor was born in Bulgaria, the country from which her maternal grandparents hailed. Sheinbaum rejected claims she wasn’t born in Mexico, and published her birth certificate to prove her point.

“I believe we can anticipate a presidency under Sheinbaum that is more disciplined than Lopez Obrador’s,” Carlos Ramirez, a political analyst at Integralia, a Mexico City-based consultancy, told Al Jazeera. “A more orderly presidency, a presidency with more planning, with a more technical profile among the officials who will surely accompany and surround her in her cabinet.” Ramirez said he expects Sheinbaum to be a “president who better understands the world, unlike Lopez Obrador, whose vision has always been very provincial, very local”.

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.

She assumes leadership of a nation confronting a range of challenges — with security issues at the forefront. In recent years, Mexico has seen more than 30,000 murders a year, and some 100,000 people are still unaccounted for. The lead-up to the June 2 election was exceptionally violent, with 37 candidates killed and hundreds forced to withdraw from the race. According to the annual public survey conducted by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), six out of 10 Mexican citizens rate insecurity as their primary concern. However, during Sheinbaum’s time as Mexico’s City mayor, according to a Reuters report, the homicide rate fell 50 percent between December 2018 and June 2023. She credited this to successful security measures which enhanced police operations and collaboration with prosecutors.

At the federal level, Sheinbaum has expressed her intention to continue AMLO’s strategy of avoiding confrontation with crime groups, while also relying on the National Guard, which is operated by the military, for security operations. “They will have to continue using the army because … [no other] institution has the strength to face the potential problems associated with the cartels and organised crime groups,” Miguel Angel Toro Rios, dean of the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Monterrey-based university, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a matter of state capacity, and Mexico does not have the state capacity without the army to face these kinds of problems,” he added.

Sheinbaum married Jesús María Tarriba Unger, her former university classmate, in an intimate civil ceremony November 20, 2023 before family and friends in Mexico City. Their romantic journey was unveiled during a 2022 radio interview, in which the then-mayor of Mexico City disclosed that she had been in a six-year relationship with Tarriba and that the two were engaged. Sheinbaum was previously married, from 1987 to 2016, to politician Carlos Ímaz Gispert. Together they have one daughter, Mariana Imaz, 35, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Her career reflects a blend of scientific expertise and political acumen, with a strong emphasis on addressing urban and environmental issues. 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.