Courtesy of Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México from México, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated as the President of Mexico on October 1st, 2024, to chants of “Presidenta!” from newly elected legislators. Succeeding former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), as both head of state and leader of Morena, Mexico’s premier left-wing populist party, President Sheinbaum starts her six-year term in a strong position, planning to implement a progressive agenda “governing for all.”
Former Mayor of Mexico City, climate scientist, and first Jewish and female president, Sheinbaum won more than 60% of the vote against her competing candidates. These included former Senator Xóchitl Gálvez, nominee of the centrist Broad Front for Mexico coalition, and Jorge Álvarez Máynez, nominee of the recently founded center-left party Citizens' Movement. Morena also won numerous victories down the ballot, with majorities in both houses of Mexico's legislature.
Sheinbaum established a strong record as Mexico City’s longtime mayor, cutting the city’s homicide rate in half with data-driven techniques and strategic boosts in funding for local law enforcement. This experience with anti-crime policy will be critical in her role as president due to the country’s deep issues with organized crime, as cartels and gangs dominate swathes of the country. AMLO pursued a policy of encouraging gangs to keep peace among themselves, but this saw very limited success, and the Mexican Army was unable to stop inter-gang violence. President Sheinbaum has vowed to pursue stronger strategies against organized crime, but will face numerous difficulties in projecting authority to regions that have been in the pockets of cartels for years. Despite the issue eluding AMLO and hanging over the inauguration, the newly-inaugurated President spent little time speaking on it during her inaugural address, focusing instead on environmental and social issues.
One of her first and most significant challenges will be rebuilding the city of Acapulco, devastated by Hurricane Otis in October of 2023 and flooded by Hurricane John in late September of 2024 before it had time to recover fully. Her first visit as president outside Mexico City was to Acapulco to assess the damage and work with state and local governments to bring much-needed aid to city residents.
Regarding climate and energy policy, President Sheinbaum vowed to continue a transition to green energy halted by AMLO, whose economic policies relied on fostering a state-run fossil fuel industry. Though sparse on specifics, her shift in rhetoric from AMLO, alongside her credentials as a climate scientist, signal a real commitment to green energy and environmental policy. The few specific goals she has spoken of are promising for climate advocates: getting Mexico to 45% clean electricity by 2030 and placing a cap on oil production. With a supermajority in both houses of Congress, she will have significant political capital to maneuver around political barriers to these goals.
President Sheinbaum has expressed a desire to work closely with the United States on the foreign policy front. Economic cooperation is the highest priority, as the two are one another’s top trading partners, but immigration and joint action against drug cartels will be critical and challenging issues as well. Challenges with immigration and cartel policy will be exacerbated by the upcoming American presidential election, which sees a tight race between two candidates with radically different stances on both immigration and security, making long-term planning for cooperation with the U.S. difficult..
On the broader global scale, President Sheinbaum has expressed a desire to focus primarily on internal politics and leave other countries to their own devices. However, she has spoken repeatedly on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, condemning both sides, earning her criticism from both Palestinian and Israeli agents. Additionally, she declined to visit Ukraine on the offer of President Zelensky, and invited Putin to her inauguration—although he did not attend. Policy analysts have suggested she is unlikely to change AMLO’s positive relationships with the regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
However, the soaring popularity and rapid reforms of Morena and former president AMLO have many in Mexico concerned for the future of its democracy. AMLO signed a highly controversial amendment into law, making it so all judges up to and including Mexico’s supreme court will be elected by popular vote. While many respect the change as a populist move to hand more power to the public, others deride it as politicizing an already fragile and overwhelmed judicial system. In addition, AMLO went on to attack the country’s National Electoral Institute, an independent institution intended to maintain free and fair elections, by limiting its independence and budget.
President Sheinbaum will, at first, govern in the shadow of AMLO. She will need to thread a tight needle to run the progressive government she promised while not allowing Mexican democracy to backslide further. As Mexico is one of Latin America’s most internationally involved states, her decisions will have important ramifications for the world, particularly for Mexico’s closest neighbors in Central and North America. Noting the stark fork in the road President Sheinbaum’s administration is presented with, former President of Mexico and Yale professor Ernesto Zedillo writes in the Economist that she “will have to decide whether to be the leader of a democratic republic or merely the powerless face of a tyranny.”
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