Claudia Sheinbaum’s record of accolades is lengthy: She has a Ph.D. and a shared Nobel Peace Prize and was the primary girl elected to guide Mexico Metropolis, her nation’s capital and one of many largest cities within the Western Hemisphere.
Now she has one other likelihood to make historical past. Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, is the clear front-runner within the Mexican election on Sunday, placing her in place to change into the nation’s first feminine president.
However she has a picture drawback, and she or he is aware of it.
Many Mexicans are questioning: Can she be her personal chief? Or is she a pawn of the present president?
“There’s this concept, as a result of quite a lot of columnists say it, that I don’t have a persona,” Ms. Sheinbaum complained to reporters earlier this 12 months. “That President Andrés Manuel López Obrador tells me what to do, that once I get to the presidency, he’s going to be calling me on the cellphone each day.”
With the Mexican election simply days away, Ms. Sheinbaum is going through a elementary dilemma.
She insists she’s going to govern independently from her mentor, Mr. López Obrador, and has some completely different priorities. However veering too removed from his agenda may very well be very dangerous.
She and Mr. López Obrador are “completely different folks,” she stated in an interview. He’s an oilman who invested in environmentally questionable initiatives; she’s a local weather scientist. But Ms. Sheinbaum has risen to the highest partially by aligning herself fully with him, and by backing strikes like his huge wager on the nationwide oil firm and constitutional adjustments that critics name antidemocratic.
Will she dare to stray from these insurance policies if she wins workplace, inviting the reproach of Mr. López Obrador and the motion that obtained her there? Or will she dedicate herself to cementing his legacy, even when it means stifling her personal imaginative and prescient?
“Claudia can’t say what she’s going to do, as a result of proper now she has to indicate absolute loyalty to Andrés Manuel,” stated Ana Laura Magaloni, a authorized knowledgeable who suggested Ms. Sheinbaum throughout her first 12 months as mayor.
“What’s going to occur when Claudia is free from that yoke, when Andrés Manuel is not there?” Ms. Magaloni stated. “Nobody is aware of.”
The opposite prime contender is a lady named Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur who’s representing a number of opposition events. However with Ms. Sheinbaum main the polls by 20 share factors, a lot of the nationwide debate has centered on who she would actually be as president.
Ms. Sheinbaum says it’s sexist to recommend that the potential first feminine chief of Mexico is absolutely solely the puppet of a person.
“There’s a hint of misogyny, of machismo there,” she informed one interviewer. “They are saying, ‘The one purpose she’s forward within the polls is as a result of she’s the identical because the president, or she’s the president’s favourite.’”
Mr. López Obrador can be remembered for doubling the minimal wage and lifting thousands and thousands out of poverty, but additionally for empowering the navy, prioritizing fossil fuels and pushing measures that critics say might weaken Mexico’s democratic establishments.
His successor stands to inherit a protracted record of troubles. The state-owned oil firm is buckling underneath debt, migration by way of the nation has reached historic highs, violence is raging and former President Donald J. Trump is already threatening tariffs if he wins the American election.
Ms. Sheinbaum informed The New York Occasions that she was ready to work with whichever candidate wins the subsequent U.S. election. Publicly, she has echoed Mr. López Obrador’s emphasis on tackling Mexico’s cartel violence and migration by addressing their root causes. In a touch of potential change, she stated in a current debate that she would search to reform the country’s migration authority, an company usually accused of corruption.
“We have to be more practical in lowering irregular crossings,” Juan Ramón de la Fuente, a member of her marketing campaign group who’s seen as her likeliest decide for overseas minister, stated in an interview.
Some in Washington have privately questioned whether or not Mexico’s cooperation on migration might lag after the nation’s elections, however Mr. de la Fuente batted away these issues. “We’ll proceed with the identical, I’d say, rigor attempting to include these flows of migrants,” he stated.
A former ballet dancer, Ms. Sheinbaum calls herself “obsessive” and “disciplined.” However self-discipline will not be sufficient, analysts say.
Mr. López Obrador is a generational political expertise who constructed his celebration right into a juggernaut by counting on the drive of his persona. When his coalition grew to become fractious, he used his huge political capital to corral inner rivals. When issues arose, he persuaded Mexicans he was fixing them even when his personal authorities’s statistics disagreed.
Now comes Ms. Sheinbaum, her demeanor extra professorial than fiery, attempting to take management of a political world outlined by Mr. López Obrador’s model of energy.
“She wants him,” stated Carlos Heredia, a Mexican political analyst. “She doesn’t have the charisma, she doesn’t have the recognition, she doesn’t have the political stamina of her personal, so she must borrow that from López Obrador.”
The Occasions spoke with two dozen individuals who have labored with or know Ms. Sheinbaum and in addition visited marketing campaign occasions, reviewed her writings and her media appearances and interviewed her, as soon as in 2020 and once more this 12 months.
What grew to become clear is that Ms. Sheinbaum has lengthy appeared extra snug quietly getting issues accomplished than promoting herself or her achievements.
The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who fled Europe, she not often discusses being Jewish or virtually something about her private life, colleagues say. When interviewers ask her concerning the Nobel Prize she shared with a panel of local weather researchers, she notes what number of others had been concerned within the work.
She is called a tricky boss with a fast mood who can encourage in her workers concern and adoration on the identical time. Publicly, although, her have an effect on is so managed it verges on aloof.
Mr. López Obrador, in contrast, is fully snug revealing his interior emotional state to the world. Almost each weekday for the final 5 years, he has held a morning information convention wherein he spends hours hashing out his anxieties, celebrating his wins and assailing his critics. When he’s not going for the jugular, he comes throughout as heat and charming.
“Andrés is extra charismatic,” Marcelo Ebrard, the previous overseas minister who’s now on Ms. Sheinbaum’s marketing campaign group, stated in an interview. A one-time rival of Ms. Sheinbaum’s throughout the celebration, Mr. Ebrard didn’t imply this negatively. Hers is “a unique form of management,” he stated, which can be “extra environment friendly” than personality-driven.
For some Mexicans, a thrills-free girl could also be an excellent antidote to an entertaining man who plunged the nation into partisan turmoil.
However her opponents simply see a chance.
At a current marketing campaign occasion for school college students, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, the third-place candidate, was requested to outline Ms. Sheinbaum.
“Very boring,” he stated, smirking. The room broke into applause.
‘The Mayor Mentioned To’
Born to 2 scientists who had been leftist activists within the capital, Ms. Sheinbaum was all the time “a critical lady,” stated Arturo Cano, a journalist who wrote a biography of the candidate. As a toddler, she made household visits to feed political prisoners, Mr. Cano stated.
Whereas on the Nationwide Autonomous College, she helped lead a motion protesting a plan to lift pupil charges and alter admissions. She married one of many leaders of the motion and had a toddler with him.
Within the early Nineteen Nineties, they moved to California, the place she studied Mexico’s vitality consumption on the Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory.
The candidate’s political profession started when Mr. López Obrador was elected mayor of Mexico Metropolis in 2000 and invited her to a gathering at a diner. “What I would like is to scale back air pollution,” she recalled Mr. López Obrador telling her. “Have you learnt how to do this?”
Ms. Sheinbaum, who by then had written greater than a dozen reviews on vitality use and carbon emissions, stated sure. She grew to become his surroundings minister. In conferences, she appeared keen to do virtually something to make her boss glad, based on a number of individuals who labored together with her.
“The phrase she used again and again was ‘The mayor stated to,’” stated Mr. Heredia, who labored together with her in metropolis authorities underneath Mr. López Obrador.
What that meant, based on Mr. Heredia: “We aren’t a cupboard for giving concepts,” he stated. “We’re a bunch of individuals right here to execute what he decides.”
Mr. Heredia was confused when he realized that Ms. Sheinbaum, the local weather knowledgeable, was overseeing the capital’s huge new funding: constructing an elevated freeway throughout Mexico Metropolis. The venture would simply encourage folks to drive extra, critics stated.
On the time, Ms. Sheinbaum stated that the brand new street decreased air pollution by easing visitors, although specialists say it’s exhausting to corroborate that declare. One 2018 research stated the impact on emissions was “not vital” as a result of despite the fact that congestion was decrease, the variety of vehicles elevated.
In 2006, Mr. López Obrador ran for president and misplaced by lower than one share level. He disputed the outcomes and led his supporters in a monthslong occupation of the capital’s downtown.
There, he held his personal inauguration ceremony, the place he proclaimed himself “the authentic president” of Mexico. Ms. Sheinbaum helped adorn him with a presidential sash. When he then arrange a “authentic cupboard,” he named Ms. Sheinbaum as a minister.
“Many people didn’t wish to be a part of them on this madness of a ‘authentic cupboard,’” stated Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, now within the opposition, who was then a part of the leftist celebration Mr. López Obrador belonged to.
“However she was there with him,” Mr. Acosta Naranjo stated, “residing on this underworld, on this alternate, parallel universe full of people that thought they had been making a revolution.”
‘What Do You Need, Somebody Tender?’
Within the years that adopted, Ms. Sheinbaum straddled academia and politics, however she all the time stayed near Mr. López Obrador. When he based his Morena celebration in 2014, he requested her to run on the celebration’s ticket to change into mayor of Tlalpan, a borough of Mexico Metropolis. Together with his backing, she gained.
In 2018, he was swept into the presidency in a landslide and she or he grew to become Mexico Metropolis’s mayor. She shortly gained a popularity as an exacting boss.
“One doesn’t go to her conferences to inform her, ‘I’m engaged on it,’” stated Soledad Aragón, a former member of Ms. Sheinbaum’s cupboard. When she walked right into a room, Ms. Aragón stated, everybody sat up straight.
The mayor might keep in mind particular numbers talked about in a gathering weeks after it occurred, Ms. Aragón stated, calling her “good” and “demanding,” particularly with herself, including: “It has gotten outcomes.”
5 officers who’ve labored with Ms. Sheinbaum, who weren’t approved to talk publicly, stated that she was fast to anger at occasions and would yell at her subordinates in entrance of huge teams. Via a spokesman, Ms. Sheinbaum declined to touch upon the accusation.
Mr. Cano, the biographer, stated that when he requested Ms. Sheinbaum concerning the “many, many tales” he had heard of her toughness as a boss, she informed him: “If there’s one factor I can’t stand, it’s lazy folks.”
Her defenders say some folks merely reacted badly to a lady in cost.
“I do know that in her authorities, typically folks obtained offended or felt dangerous as a result of she yelled at them,” stated Marta Lamas, a longtime feminist activist who has been near Ms. Sheinbaum and her group. “But when a person yells, it wouldn’t be a problem as a result of culturally, it’s completely different.”
“Folks say it in a vital means: ‘She’s robust,’” Ms. Aragón stated. “What would you like, somebody mushy answerable for the town?”
By the point Covid hit Mexico, Ms. Sheinbaum had eked out some house to control her personal means, empowering technocrats over celebration loyalists and investing within the police to combat crime, as an alternative of counting on the navy like Mr. López Obrador.
Now, in interviews, she factors to the pandemic as proof that she and Mr. López Obrador should not all the time aligned.
Mr. López Obrador not often wore masks in public, urged two amulets would defend him from Covid and didn’t emphasize nationwide testing. Ms. Sheinbaum examined aggressively and pushed mask-wearing.
However when scientific ideas conflicted together with her loyalty, Ms. Sheinbaum selected loyalty.
As Christmas approached in 2020, with hospital beds operating low, the federal authorities misled residents concerning the severity of the virus within the capital, saying it hadn’t reached the vital stage of contagion that may have required a full lockdown. The capital stayed open for weeks.
Ms. Sheinbaum might have shut the town down earlier, however didn’t. The end result was an infinite outbreak.
An impartial fee this 12 months referred to as the episode “one of the vital critical authorities failures” of the pandemic in Mexico. Ms. Sheinbaum has stated she disagrees with the fee’s findings.
No Confrontation, No Submission
Ms. Sheinbaum’s habits in the course of the marketing campaign has been a form of Rorschach take a look at for the Mexicans obsessing over what path she would take if elected president. Those that assume she would break from Mr. López Obrador see indicators of autonomy all over the place. Those that disagree see solely obedience.
Subscribers to the primary narrative level to the candidate’s appointment of well-respected specialists to her marketing campaign group, her vow to advertise renewable vitality and her openness to re-evaluating the navy’s enlargement into public enterprises.
However she has additionally gotten behind a few of the president’s most contentious concepts.
In February, Mr. López Obrador put forth a set of profound adjustments to the structure, together with eliminating impartial regulators and requiring Supreme Court docket justices to be elected by standard vote. The transfer provoked alarm amongst critics, who stated the president was attempting to obliterate checks and balances.
Nonetheless, a day later, Ms. Sheinbaum fell in line, holding a information convention the place she introduced she would undertake all his proposals as her personal.
To the naysayers, this was an illustration of their worst fears: Ms. Sheinbaum following directions from Mr. López Obrador to take steps that may hurt democracy.
However Mr. de la Fuente, who helps to design Ms. Sheinbaum’s plans, appeared to downplay the significance of the proposed adjustments to the judiciary.
“I wouldn’t say it’s essentially the highest precedence,” he stated, including that Morena would wish to win a supermajority in Congress to push the measures by way of, one thing celebration officers see as unlikely.
Between Ms. Sheinbaum and Mr. López Obrador, he added, “There can be no confrontation, however there can be no submission.”
For years, the candidate has tried to clarify how she could be so in keeping with the president whereas additionally being herself. The reply, she says, is easy: She genuinely believes in him.
In 2022, a radio host requested her a pointed query from a feminine listener: “Why don’t you select to be a lady who governs together with her personal concepts? Why don’t you get out of AMLO’s circus?” she requested, utilizing Mr. López Obrador’s nickname. “Why have the identical rhetoric with the identical phrases?”
Ms. Sheinbaum didn’t hesitate.
“In case you assume the identical as one other particular person, it’s not that you just’re copying them; you simply agree with the concepts,” she stated. “You possibly can’t deny what you consider.”
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico Metropolis.
