A scientist, a leftist and a former mayor of Mexico City. Who is Claudia Sheinbaum? – Queen City News

CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN, Associated Press

4 hours ago

Ruling party presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum shows her ID as she leaves a polling station where she voted during the general election in Mexico City, Sunday, June 2, 2024. Mexico’s next president and the first female leader in over 200 years of independence, Sheinbaum captured the post promising continuity, emerging victorious on Monday morning. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum, who will be Mexico’s first female leader in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence, has won the presidency promising continuity.

The 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor ran a disciplined campaign, capitalizing on her predecessor’s popularity, before emerging victorious in Sunday’s vote, according to an official quick count. But with her victory now in hand, Mexicans will be looking to see how Sheinbaum, a very different personality from mentor and current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will assert herself.

Although she has become close to López Obrador politically and shares many of his ideas about the government’s role in tackling inequality, she is seen as less combative and more data-driven.

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 the hardening showed in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of about 9 million people took a different approach than what López Obrador has advocated nationally.

While the federal government has played down the importance of coronavirus testing, Mexico City has expanded its testing regime. Sheinbaum set limits on business hours and capacity when the virus was spreading rapidly, even as López Obrador wanted to avoid any measures that would hurt the economy. She too publicly wore protective masks and called for social distancing while the president was still throwing himself into crowds.

Mexico’s persistently high levels of violence will be one of her most immediate challenges after she takes office on October 1. During the campaign, she said little more than that she would expand López Obrador’s quasi-militant National Guard and continue her strategy of targeting the social ills that make so many young Mexicans easy targets for cartel recruitment.

“To be clear, it’s not about an iron fist or wars or authoritarianism,” Sheinbaum said of her approach to combating gangs during the final campaign event. “We will promote a strategy to tackle the causes and continue to move towards zero impunity.”

Sheinbaum heaped praise on López Obrador and said little that the president didn’t say himself. She blamed neoliberal economic policies for consigning millions to poverty, promised a strong welfare state and praised Mexico’s big state oil company, Pemex, while promising to focus on clean energy.

“To me, being on the left is about that, about guaranteeing minimum rights to all residents,” Sheinbaum told the AP last year.

Unlike López Obrador, who seemed to relish his highly public battles with other branches of government and also with the media, Sheinbaum is expected by many observers to be less combative or at least more selective in picking fights.

“It looks like it’s going to go in a different direction,” said Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a political scientist at the Iberoamerican University. “I don `t know how much.”

Sheinbaum will also be the first person of Jewish background to lead the largely Catholic country.

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