Mexico’s History-Making Leader Charts Her Own Course–Delicately

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(Bloomberg Markets) — Twelve days after Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo won the June election that would make her Mexico’s first female head of state, she hit the road with the spectacle-loving President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as the Mexican leader is called, had years ago been her first boss in public office, coaxing her out of academia and making her chief of the capital’s environmental office. The party he founded, Morena, had become the top political force in the country after it first appeared on a ballot in 2015. But before Sheinbaum’s Oct. 1 inauguration, he insisted they take a tour together of Mexico’s 31 states and its capital.

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One skeptical columnist called it a “hijacking” of the president-elect’s agenda. People who criticized his leadership wondered when Sheinbaum would come out from under the president’s yoke. López Obrador had promised he’d retire to a lagoon-lined plot of land and have nothing to do with politics, but he didn’t take a back seat in the transition. He continued to give the daily hourslong press conference that he’d invented to speak to listeners across Mexico. (You could watch the mañanera on YouTube or on any major TV news channel.) The constitutional reforms he proposed, including a rewriting of the judicial system, remained front-page news throughout the summer and into the days before the transfer of power.

Sheinbaum is negotiating a position similar to US Vice President Kamala Harris’, seeking to prove she can take over from her more experienced boss. Except AMLO wasn’t eligible to run because the law limits presidents to a single six-year term. Sheinbaum has smarted at suggestions that he’d pull the strings. Even as she put together a cabinet of academics and politicians some saw as potentially more market-friendly and likely to speed the transition from fossil fuels, she seemed to place loyalty to AMLO first. “There are adversaries who want there to be a break between us,” Sheinbaum told the press at her headquarters in Mexico City in August. “But there won’t be. We’re part of the same project. We’ll each have our moment in history. We each have our own style of governing.”

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Thirty-six million people voted for Sheinbaum, giving her nearly 60% of the vote and a 32-point lead over her closest rival. It was the biggest winning margin in Mexico’s modern history, thanks in no small part to López Obrador. The ruling coalition won almost two-thirds of the seats in both houses of Congress, the portion required to change the constitution, spooking investors concerned about stability. Nevertheless, voters praised the programs AMLO had started. He’d defended the state’s oil company and electric utility, challenging private players’ outsize role. He’d pushed back against US influence in Mexican affairs and created a state bank to get government cash more easily into the public’s hands. The minimum wage more than doubled in real terms since he entered office.

Despite criticism that he’d undermined the balance of power by being belligerent toward everyone from Supreme Court judges to election officials to journalists, AMLO had painted himself as an indefatigable underdog fighting Mexico’s ultrarich elite that had made life hard for ­working-class Mexicans. At age 70 he’s leaving office so popular that people sold dolls of him outside political events far before they created plush-toy Sheinbaums. One state lawmaker set up ­carnivalesque boards with a cutout image of AMLO, so fans could step in for a snapshot with their president.

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The tours were a chance for AMLO to cry victory and to restate his faith in Sheinbaum, a 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor. They met across the country every Friday, returning late in the day on Sunday. López Obrador flew on a military plane, Sheinbaum on a commercial flight. (He sold the presidential plane to Tajikistan.) They followed the right codes of attire in different parts of the country, wearing embroidered shirts and dresses in the less developed south, formal office business wear when they headed to the more industrialized north. But the hourslong private chats when they were on the road between public events most intrigued Mexico watchers.

Sheinbaum, a data lover known to get her start before dawn, will inherit a $1.79 trillion economy, the second-­largest in Latin America and 15th in the world. Global trade changes have brought Mexico a new wave of foreign cash, as the US imposition of tariffs on China forced companies to look for cheap production elsewhere. Last year it became the No. 1 US trade partner. And Mexicans had begun to earn more, due in part to a ban on outsourcing businesses’ core operations, requiring companies to hire employees directly and pay benefits. The authorities also collected back taxes from companies, including Walmart Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., giving the government more revenue while avoiding the politics of raising taxes.

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Even so, more than a third of people still live in poverty, and gross domestic product per capita fell over the president’s term. The deficit this year increased to 5.9% of GDP, the highest since the 1980s. Next year, the central bank estimates growth will slow to 1.2%, which could constrain Sheinbaum in her early days in office. The country continues to suffer a security crisis, with more than 30,000 murders per year in a country of more than 130 million people. There’s a running list of ­citizens who’ve disappeared and whose faces appear on posters on the subway, on electricity poles and in public squares. Extortion has increased the price of everything from avocados to limes directed at buyers abroad.

It will soon be Sheinbaum’s job to sort it all out.

Unlike AMLO, who grew up in a small town in Mexico’s oil-producing south, Sheinbaum was raised in Mexico City, the daughter of a biology professor and a chemical engineer who worked in the leather industry. Her Jewish grandparents emigrated from Europe in the first half of the 20th century, making her a minority in the primarily Catholic country. AMLO plays up his everyman image, talking about the price of tortillas and his family’s train station restaurant. Sheinbaum studied ballet and wrote her undergraduate thesis on ­thermodynamics. Even so, she was steeped in the political movements of the time and recorded an album of Latin American folk songs with other kids.

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At the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, where she earned a Ph.D. in energy engineering, Sheinbaum was part of a hard-won student union in the 1980s. Protesters shut down the university over an increase in student fees and other measures. Sheinbaum has talked about how demonstrations grew to include more than 100,000 people. She appears in a documentary, called Days of the Strike, in a black-and-white sweater, her hair cut boyishly short, in the middle of the rebellious group. “We blocked the entrances with people,” says Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, a friend of Sheinbaum’s from university. “We thought it was fundamental to the political life of the country that there shouldn’t be repression.”

For a while, Sheinbaum seemed bound for the life of an academic. She fell for one of the other leaders of the student movement, Carlos Ímaz Gispert, and they spent a few years in California raising their two children. There she finished part of her doctoral thesis at a laboratory in Berkeley, while he obtained a degree in education at Stanford University. Upon their return to Mexico, she continued her research at UNAM and delighted in giving classes. She helped author two prestigious reports from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; for the first, in which she had a smaller role, the group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Her daughter, meanwhile, became a philosopher specializing in the narrative construction of history, and her son an artist and filmmaker.

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At the same time, politics lured Sheinbaum back. In 2015 she served in her first elected role, as borough leader of Tlalpan, a district in the south of Mexico City where she’s lived. Three years later, she won the mayoral race. After a divorce, she rekindled a romance with a college friend, Jesús María Tarriba, a financial risk analyst at Mexico’s central bank, and married him in 2023.

Her party, Morena, was originally straightforwardly leftist, as López Obrador’s first two failed attempts to be president under the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) had him looking to fight alleged election fraud. But it has become ideologically diffuse as it’s expanded. Its ­founding members, Sheinbaum included, railed against the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed for much of the 20th century, and the more conservative National Action Party (PAN), which ruled in the early 2000s.

Under AMLO, Morena advocated for limits to ­private-sector influence and sought to restore the former glory of the highly indebted oil company Petróleos Mexicanos. At the same time, the party celebrated elements of the country’s free trade agreement with the US and Canada and expanded the military’s footprint. Its programs reduced inequality and helped the elderly but failed to address extreme poverty.

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As mayor of North America’s largest city, Sheinbaum gave more powers to police, reduced the homicide rate, electrified the city’s fleet of buses and added cable cars that lifted commuters far above traffic, talking points for her presidential campaign. Wearing her hair pulled back into a ponytail as tightly as a classical dancer’s, she’s known to be exacting, detail-oriented and at times flinty with the press. “The strategy was not to fall for provocations,” she said to a radio reporter in May, after a debate. She repeated often that it was women who should lead in Mexico but brushed off criticism of her police’s forceful response to feminist marchers. She pushed for a greening of cities but avoided discussing the environmental damage of AMLO’s term.

The presidential victory tour illustrated the two politicians’ contrasting styles. The duo visited AMLO’s flagship works: a refinery on the Atlantic coast, a tourist train that snakes through five states in the Yucatán Peninsula, solar farms in the Sonoran Desert, roads and hospitals and waterworks. They came onto each stage waving at spectators who filmed them on cellphones and held up hand-painted banners. She’d take the microphone before him, warming up the crowd with lines that were like stadium anthems—“We don’t lie, we don’t steal, and we’ll never betray the people!”—and then turn it over to the president. He’d give her a kiss on the cheek, a squeeze of the arm and take to the stage for a final hurrah.

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In July, in the manufacturing-heavy state of San Luis Potosí, AMLO brought his speech to a crescendo in front of the crowd as he talked about politicians of years past, who’d come offering livestock and dried beans, only to disappear once they won an election. Inevitably, the speeches ended with: “Long live Mexico!” Inevitably, he’d call Sheinbaum “an extraordinary woman.” Inevitably, he’d wait a second for people to chime in when he said, “Amor con amor se paga” (“Love is repaid with love”)—his signature slogan.

“I voted for him before he was famous,” said Raul Araiza Guerrero, 65, a retired tire factory worker in a sea of fans who wore matching shirts featuring a goofy-looking cartoon AMLO. Even after laps around the country, Sheinbaum was still a mystery to some. “Based on what she said now, it seems she’s going to follow the same policies, but we’ll have to see,” Araiza said.

Sheinbaum has brought into her cabinet people who’ve worked with López Obrador. His finance minister will stay on; his public security chief will be her interior minister; his former foreign affairs minister, her economy minister; his current foreign affairs minister, her environmental chief.

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More controversially, Sheinbaum has defended the president’s proposal to choose the Supreme Court and federal judges by popular vote–a plan that led employees of the court system to walk out in protest in September. Fitch Ratings in July said Mexico’s BBB- credit rating was stable but warned of the country’s “weak governance indicators, a record of muted long-term growth performance and fiscal risks.” The Mexican peso, which had before the election been one of the world’s best-performing currencies, plunged more than 12% from the election to the day in September when the Senate approved the judicial selection bill.

Investors and Morena critics feared that the president, in one of his last acts in office, would demolish the division between the executive branch and the other parts of government. Ostensibly a move to reinforce democracy, the law will nonetheless make every voter choose between candidates for at least dozens, if not hundreds, of positions. Judges could have to cater to political parties that helped campaign on their behalf. Some ex-officials and analysts are also concerned the change could return Mexico to one-party rule—the kind of unilateral power of the PRI that both AMLO and Sheinbaum have condemned. US lawmakers wrote a letter warning of the dangers for American companies. “It’s not just an overhaul of the judiciary, it’s of the republic, of its system of checks and balances,” says Vanessa Rubio Márquez, a London School of Economics professor and former finance undersecretary under AMLO’s predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto.

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Sheinbaum’s approach was not to overstep her ally. In the mining state of Zacatecas, she spoke for 10 minutes to AMLO’s 24 before a sea of ­sombrero-wearing farmers. At the July gathering, people still wondered whether, once she assumes the presidency, she’d shift her approach. “I think women are more subtle in trying to get where we want to go,” said Aida García Medina, a schoolteacher who came to hear the first elected woman president of Mexico and stood outside the glass-walled conference center overlooking the hills. “She’ll have to make her own decisions and chart her own path,” García said. “Of course, she’s following his road map because she has been by his side and knows everything about him. She’s kept the best parts.”

In Colima, while inaugurating an aqueduct on the Pacific coast in August, Sheinbaum reaffirmed López Obrador’s success, then gave hints of ideas of her own, such as a cash aid program for older women, scholarships for all public school kids and at-home health care for the elderly. She’d continue to develop trains, like one to Nuevo Laredo, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, and another to Nogales, in the northwestern state of Sonora. “There is nobody in history, and I said it yesterday, too, that is leaving the presidency with the love and popularity of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” Sheinbaum said. “We do everything with the people; without them, nothing. And we will govern with these principles starting on Oct. 1.”

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Asked again if he’d intervene once she’s president, López Obrador insisted he would never. One of his sons was interested in a party leadership role (and ultimately took one), but he himself wouldn’t get involved. He had a book to write about Mexican history before the Spanish conquest of Indigenous people. He’d be available to talk about baseball, but not politics. Someone had gifted him binoculars, which he said he planned to use to look at macaws in the trees outside his home.

Still, Sheinbaum will have to overcome doubt that AMLO will also be content to watch her wield presidential power from afar. In September, as protests continued against the judicial election change, Sheinbaum agreed that it would reinforce democracy, but then she transitioned to her own agenda. She announced to the press that she’d be moving to the National Palace. AMLO, she said, would be moving out at the end of the month.

Averbuch covers economics and politics from Mexico City.

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