Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, scientist who will head Mexico as 1st female prez | World News
 "Claudia Sheinbaum")
Sheinbaum’s victory came 70 years after women won the right to vote in Mexico | Image: Reuters
Claudia Sheinbaum takes office Tuesday as Mexico’s first female president in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence.
The 62-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist campaigned on a promise of continuity, of protecting and expanding the signature initiatives of her mentor, former President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador.
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In the four months between her election and inauguration she held that line, backing Lpez Obrador on issues big and small. But Sheinbaum is a very different person; she likes data and doesn’t have Lpez Obrador’s backslapping personal touch.
Mexico now waits to see if she will step out of his shadow.
What’s Sheinbaum’s background?
Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, I believe in science.
Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the Covid-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what Lpez Obrador espoused at the national level.
She comes from an older, more solidly left tradition that predates Lpez Obrador’s nationalistic, populist movement.
Her parents were leading activists in Mexico’s 1968 student movement, which ended tragically in a government massacre of hundreds of student demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza just days before the Summer Olympics opened there that year.
Sheinbaum is also the first president with a Jewish background in the largely Catholic country.
What did her victory look like?
Sheinbaum led wire to wire and won convincingly in June with almost 60 per cent of the vote, about double the number of her nearest competitor, Xchitl Glvez.
As Lpez Obrador’s chosen successor, she enjoyed the boost of the high popularity he maintained throughout his six years in office.
The opposition’s coalition led by Glvez struggled to gain traction, while support for the governing party carried over to Congress, where voters gave Morena and its allies margins that allowed it to pass important constitutional changes before Lpez Obrador left office.
Where does she stand on recent contentious issues?
Before passage of a controversial constitutional overhaul of Mexico’s judiciary that will make all judges stand for election, Sheinbaum stood with Lpez Obrador who had pushed it.
Sheinbaum said the reforms to the judicial system will not affect our commercial relations, nor private Mexican investments, nor foreign ones. Rather the opposite, there will be a greater and better rule of law and democracy for everyone.
Shortly after, when Lpez Obrador’s proposal to put the National Guard under military command was being considered, Sheinbaum defended it against critics. She said it would not militarize the country and that the National Guard would respect human rights.
And just days before she took office, Sheinbaum stood with Lpez Obrador in his long-running diplomatic spat with Spain. She defended her decision to not invite Spain’s King Felipe VI to her inauguration, saying in part that the king had failed to apologise for Spain’s conquest of Mexico as Lpez Obrador had demanded years earlier.
How important is her election for Mexican women?
Sheinbaum’s victory came 70 years after women won the right to vote in Mexico.
The race really came down to two women, Sheinbaum and Glvez, but Mexico’s prevailing machismo still pushed both women to explain why they thought they could be president.
Since 2018, Mexico’s Congress has had a 50-50 gender split, in part due to gender quotas set for party candidates. Still, Sheinbaum inherits a country with soaring levels of violence against women.
There are also still many parts of the country, especially rural Indigenous areas where men hold all the power. And some 2.5 million women toil in domestic work where despite reforms they continue to face low pay, abuse by employers, long hours and unstable working conditions.
Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that national laws prohibiting abortions are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights.
Although the Mexican ruling orders the removal of abortion from the federal penal code and requires federal health institutions to offer the procedure to anyone who requests it, further state-by-state legal work is pending to remove all penalties.
Feminists say that simply electing a woman as president does not guarantee she will govern with a gender perspective. Both Sheinbaum and Lpez Obrador have been criticized before for appearing to lack empathy toward women protesting against gender violence.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First Published: Oct 01 2024 | 10:47 AM IST
