Claudia Sheinbaum’s epic electoral victory would not have been possible without AMLO’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity. The question is: what will she do with her newfound power after the hand over on Oct. 1?
The word “historic” tends to slip too easily into newspaper headlines in post election analysis, but in the case of Mexico’s elections this past weekend, history was most definitely made — on a number of fronts. For the first time in over 200 years of (relative) national independence, Mexico has its first female president. As the Washington Post reported with time-honoured sensitivity, “Mexico is famous for its macho culture,” yet it “has just elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in what was essentially a race between two women engineers.”
The Post contrasts this landmark achievement in Mexico with the “two-man contest” about to take place in the US between Biden and Trump, while predictably ignoring Robert Kennedy Junior’s independent candidacy in the presidential race. It correctly points out that Mexico is “eclipsing its northern neighbour on gender parity in governance”, and not just in the highest office: “women hold half the seats in Mexico’s legislature — roughly double the percentage in the U.S. Congress” — and there is a larger share of female governors than in the US.
Electoral Bloodbath
The elections were historic for another reason: the sheer scale of the bloodbath. According to projections made by the National Electoral Institute, or INE, the 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor garnered around 58-60% of votes. That is around 30 percentage points more than her conservative rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, and some 50 percentage points ahead of the only man in the race, centrist candidate Jorge Alvarez Maynez. It is also six percentage points more than Mexico’s outgoing President Andres Manuel López Obrador’s vote haul in 2018 (53.2%) and according to El País, the highest vote count of any presidential candidate in recent history.
Support for Mexico’s traditional parties, the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which in Gálvez fielded a unified candidate who was uniquely unqualified to govern, once again crumbled, both at the national and state level. Sheinbaum’s ruling MORENA party also benefited from a mass exodus into its ranks of PRI governors, senators and representatives, some, unfortunately, with long histories of corruption.
Sheinbaum’s crushing victory would not have been possible without López Obrador’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity. As the US pollster Gallup reported just days before the election, López Obrador (aka AMLO) is ending his six-year term with record high approval ratings of 80%, making him one of the world’s most popular national leaders. It puts to shame his presidential counterparts in North America. After less than four years in office, Joe Biden is the least popular US president in 75 years, according to Newsweek, while Trudeau’s approval ratings consistently hover at or below 40%.
In 2023, confidence in the national government was twice as high in Mexico as it was in the U.S. (30%). What’s more, public approval of, and confidence in, the government actually grew over time, as opposed to steadily or rapidly declining. When was the last time that happened in your country?
First Jewish President
Sheinbaum is not just Mexico’s first female president; she is also its first Jewish president — no mean feat in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations and whose Jewish community represents just 0.03% of the populace. A daughter of a Sephardic mother and an Ashkenazi father who were both active in left-wing movements in the 60’s, Sheinbaum is not a practising Jew. During the campaign she described herself as “non-religious.”
Like her parents, Sheinbaum’s background was in academia before entering politics in the late ’90s. Per Wikipedia:
“[She] studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she earned an undergraduate degree in 1989. She earned a master’s degree in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1995 in energy engineering…
In 1995, she joined the faculty at the Institute of Engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She was a researcher at the Institute of Engineering and is a member of both the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. In 1999, she received the prize for best UNAM young researcher in engineering and technological innovation…
In 2007, she joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the United Nations in the field of energy and industry, as a contributing writer on the topic “Mitigation of Climate Change” for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
A Sheinbaum presidency is unlikely to result in a substantial shift in Mexico’s stance toward Isreal and Palestine. The North American nation has maintained ties with both Israel and Palestine for decades and has consistently held a fairly neutral position on the Middle Eastern conflict regardless of the ruling political party.
“If we take sides we would not help to bring about what should matter most to all of us: that the war stops, that there are no more deaths, dead, murdered in Gaza,” said AMLO last week. “That is why we have acted very cautiously.”
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Nick Corbishley 