Claudia Sheinbaum: Who is the shy scientist who became Mexico’s first female president?

Mexicans call her simply “Claudia.” The mother of two has a doctorate in environmental engineering and is a former mayor of the country’s capital, Mexico City, which has a population of more than nine million.

As of October 1, she will become the country’s first female president.

“I’ve always been that way, very adventurous,” Sheinbaum says of that moment at the student protest. “But now I’m not like that anymore. I’m taking on more responsibilities.”

Sheinbaum will assume the presidency of a country with a population of 130 million, a poverty rate of 36 percent, bordering the United States, and suffering from an alarming rate of murders of women and violence by organized crime.

Even with these responsibilities, Diana Alarcón, her friend and political advisor, says Sheinbaum will remain steadfast in her ideas.

“It’s not that she stopped being revolutionary,” Alarcón explained. “It’s that she set her in motion.” [السياسية] “It may have changed, but her conviction to fight for the people, which she embraced from a young age, remains the same.”

For the past six years, Mexico has been ruled by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who belongs to the same party. Known by his initials, AMLO, he ended his term with a 60 percent approval rating, having achieved a stable economy and leaving most Mexicans with a sense of optimism, which Sheinbaum hopes to maintain.

The presidency in Mexico is limited to one six-year term, which means that Obrador or AMLO cannot run again. He has been described as Sheinbaum’s mentor, which goes some way to explaining her triumph.

However, Sheinbaum has something different: She is an award-winning scientist who has applied her research to successful public policies.

Sheinbaum was born on June 24, 1962, in Mexico City, to parents who were leftist activists and pioneers of academic work.

Her father, Carlos Sheinbaum, was a businessman and chemist. His parents were Ashkenazi Jews and came to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s. Her mother, Annie Pardo, was a biologist and physician, and her parents were Sephardic Jews who came from Bulgaria in the 1940s.

Sheinbaum grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in South D.C., where politics were discussed over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her parents often took her to visit their struggling friends in prison.

The young Sheinbaum attended a secular school that promoted student independence, something unusual in a Catholic country. From there, she is said to have acquired a meticulous and active personality, and was known to analyze ideas before arriving at conclusions.

“She is shy,” says Alarcón, her friend since the 1970s. “For this reason she may give the impression of being serious, but once you sit with her, you feel that she is warm, funny and compassionate.”

Sheinbaum often introduces herself by saying, “I’m a daughter of 1968,” referring to the global protest movement her parents were part of.

The 1980s were also a pivotal period in her life; As corruption scandals began to discredit Mexico’s old political class, the neoliberal economic model, which favored the transfer of economic matters from the government to the private sector, began to be implemented. For Sheinbaum, this amounted to inequality and impoverishment for the people of Mexico.

Politics has always been close to Sheinbaum’s life; Her first husband was Carlos Emaz, a leftist politician. They subsequently divorced, before she married Jesús María Tarpilla in 2023, a financial risk analyst, whom she first met at university.

Sheinbaum has devoted much of her time to academia, in addition to earning her doctorate, and has written several dissertations on topics such as efficient wood-burning stoves in indigenous communities.

The year 2000 saw two political events in Mexico that helped pave the way for today’s Sheinbaum presidency.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the presidential elections for the first time in more than 70 years to the Alliance for Change. In Mexico City, a leftist extremist from Tabasco, in the poor south, won the position of mayor of the city, and the winner was AMLO, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current president.

It was also at this time that Amlo and Sheinbaum met after a recommendation from a mathematics professor and activist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, so that Sheinbaum would assume the position of Minister of the Environment in his administration.

AMLO appointed Sheinbaum and entrusted her with two tasks: cleaning up one of the most polluted cities in the world, and building the second floor of the Periferico Road, the largest highway in the city. Sheinbaum accomplished both tasks.

When the AMLO administration lost the 2006 elections, Sheinbaum returned to academia and became part of a Nobel Peace Prize-winning team investigating climate change.

However, Sheinbaum maintained a foothold in politics, becoming a spokeswoman for AMLO’s unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 2006 and 2012.

In 2015, she entered the political spotlight, after running and winning for mayor of Tlalpan, the largest neighborhood in Mexico City, where Sheinbaum grew up.

Three years later, when AMLO became president of Mexico, Sheinbaum became mayor of Mexico City, which quickly made her one of the contenders to succeed him.

However, it was not spared from finger-pointing and scrutiny.

During the 2017 Puebla earthquake, estimated at 7.1 magnitude, a school in Tlalpan that had been built with irregularities collapsed, killing 17 children. The opposition and some families blamed Sheinbaum for not closing the school since the problems were first reported.

In 2021, a subway accident killed 27 people. Sheinbaum launched an investigation that revealed deficiencies in construction between 2014 and 2015, when her party was ruling the city, prompting many to blame her again.

During this presidential campaign, these accusations surfaced, in addition to other unsubstantiated accusations of plagiarism in her academic work, along with another accusation that she was an AMLO “puppet.”

“I’ve asked her twice in my life why she would put herself at the mercy of this difficult thing that is politics,” says Alarcón, Sheinbaum’s friend. “In both cases, she said, ‘Because it’s the right thing to do.’”

She added: “For this reason, people see her as trustworthy, because she does not seek power for the sake of power, but because she feels a responsibility to society.”

Despite complaints and accusations, more than 60 percent of Mexico City’s citizens approved of Sheinbaum’s administration; This was after their feelings of insecurity, which was partly linked to violence, decreased, bicycle paths increased in the city, and the longest cable car in the world was built, with a length of 4.8 kilometers.

Despite this, Sheinbaum’s most notable achievement politically so far was the way she dealt with the Corona pandemic in Mexico City, which demonstrated the difference in her way of managing matters from AMLO.

Sheinbaum closed Mexico City with the spread of Corona, while AMLO denied the seriousness of the epidemic. Sheinbaum wore a mask, unlike AMLO, and promoted universal vaccination, which AMLO was skeptical about.

However, these differences did not change anything in Amlo being his favorite successor.

Jorge Zepeda Patterson, a journalist and political commentator who interviewed both, says, “Amlo learned, over time, to respect her. He realized that she deserved to bear responsibility. She may not be a politician, but she is a wonderful administrator.”

A lot of speculation has risen regarding her presidency, about whether (AMLO) will be the one who makes the actual decisions, and whether she will be able to keep the senior military personnel and rulers under control, in addition to speculation about her continuing to pursue her predecessor’s pragmatic policy towards the United States.

“What I can assure you is that it will be as you used to,” says Alarcón, her old friend. “In the 1980s, it was her turn to hang the flag.” [الخاص بالإضراب] On the office of the President of the National University of Nanterre in Mexico, she succeeded in that, and now it is her turn to build universities.

She added: “I have no doubt that she will do it. She will remain the same, she will remain Claudia.”