Will the First Female President of Mexico Finish Off its Democracy?
Claudia Sheinbaum combines brilliance with a fierce loyalty to the country's outgoing populist president, making her tenure unpredictable
Earlier this month, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum president by an overwhelming 30-point margin. You’d think this gives her a crushing electoral mandate—it doesn’t. Having pitched herself as a stand-in for Mexico’s hugely popular but term-limited president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador—better known as AMLO—Claudia Sheinbaum is ascending to Mexico’s powerful presidency as a cipher, running on borrowed charisma at the head of a party she doesn’t control, committed to a troubling agenda of rolling back democratic institutions. In a country where democracy is new and nostalgia for single party-rule remains strong, the first democratically elected female president could double as that democracy’s undertaker.
AMLO’s Acolyte
Or she might not. It’s hard to tell. After two-and-a-half decades in public life, all the public really knows about Claudia Sheinbaum is her dogged determination not to allow any daylight at all between herself and her hyper-popular mentor. And so, how you feel about her is irreducibly a function of how you feel about him.
The transformation AMLO trumpets and Sheinbaum echoes is a statist hodge-podge of old left-wing ideas about the state’s central role in development, and the army’s role in the state, all under the unitary power of an imperial presidency. The settlement is populist and personalist: Fiscal transfers are portrayed not as entitlements, emanating from the rights of citizenship, but as direct favors from the president personally. AMLO publicly lambasts the press. On the security front, despite Mexico’s sky-high crime rate, he champions a policy of “hugs not bullets,” requiring the army and national guard to avoid direct confrontation with organized crime.
Meanwhile, institutions tasked with overseeing the president’s power, and with counting the votes, have been targeted for institutional vandalism, ensuring the advantage that accrues to the party in power grows exponentially. Last year, AMLO tried to gut the country’s election oversight body before the courts stopped him. Since then he set in motion reforms aimed at other independent regulatory agencies and to make Supreme Court justices elected by popular vote.
To the large majority of Mexicans who idolize their outgoing president, Sheinbaum will carry this torch, sticking it to the neoliberal elite that kept them poor and standing proudly for Mexico’s sovereignty. To that smaller group who oppose him, the torch she carries is that of his assault against Mexico’s independent institutions: his politicization of the military, of elections management, his declawing of independent oversight and law-based government as such.
Claudia’s Charisma Problem
“Every piece about Claudia Sheinbaum ends up being a piece about AMLO” is how hemispheric analyst James Bosworth put it to me. That stands to reason. But if the simplest read is that Sheinbaum is just like AMLO without the charisma, that’s a bit like saying the desert is just like the beach without the ocean. With the personal magnetism to maintain unimaginable levels of popularity through the pandemic, AMLO is an outlier from the last populist wave. His policy agenda was always confused at best, incoherent at worst: a mix of ‘70s style resource nationalism and anti-elite posturing in public, layered over a willingness to accommodate elites behind the scenes.
It takes off-the-charts natural charisma to pull that off. Sheinbaum doesn’t have it. Her wooden delivery and obvious trouble connecting with normal Mexicans make it doubtful she can keep the AMLO coalition together without his direct help.
Yet no one has ever doubted Claudia Sheinbaum’s smarts, or her immense capacity for hard work. You get a sense of her discipline and mindset from her early training in the intensely competitive world of classical ballet: she could have gone pro at age 18, but decided to pursue a science career, like both of her parents. She eventually earned a doctorate in energy engineering, doing much of her research work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
With a scientist’s eye for policy detail, Sheinbaum successfully tackled one of the hardest tasks in Mexican politics as Head of Government of Mexico City (roughly equivalent to a governor) between 2018 and 2023. Leaving that bruising job with high popularity has never been easy. She managed it, and earned AMLO’s nod as a result.
Technocratic where AMLO is populist, guarded where AMLO is expansive, Sheinbaum remains an enigmatic figure. Technocratic, in this context, doesn’t mean conservative, or even moderate. Sheinbaum likes to underline that she came up through Mexico’s radical student movement, in opposition to the increasingly elite-dominated system of the 1970s and ‘80s. Her public persona is more uniformly left-wing than AMLO’s, whose coalition is a hodge-podge of different political persuasions.
Populist Puppet?
See how it’s hard to capture her? For all her deep roots in Mexico’s progressive movement and her undoubted feminist chops, Sheinbaum’s rise to power is down to her superb execution of a disarmingly simple plan: keep the big man’s favor. It’s a strange calling card for a would-be feminist role model.
In practice, it means that in the quarter century since she first became AMLO’s environment secretary back when he ran Mexico City, Sheinbaum has simply never taken any position that differs materially from his. Even on policy areas where it stands to reason the two must differ, she has never allowed that to be known. Sheinbaum is an environmental scientist and engineer, AMLO a proud energy nationalist and climate dinosaur committed to pumping as much oil from under Mexico’s soil—under state control, obviamente—as humanly possible. If she has ever had any misgivings about that position, nobody’s ever heard them.
What precisely happens when the brutally smart, famously competent understudy who has spent an entire career shadowing a mentor is called on to take over from him is hard to predict. Certainly nobody imagines Sheinbaum will pick a fight with AMLO when she is in power. How far exactly she will allow herself to stray from his line is probably the hottest topic of debate in Mexico today.
It’s unlikely her leash will be all that long. On issues that AMLO is passionate about, like energy, it’s hard to imagine her contradicting him. On others he’s less intense about, like security or the relationship with the United States, she may have more leeway. But having campaigned explicitly as AMLO part II, it’s hard to imagine she’ll reverse his onslaught against Mexico’s democratic institutions: a six-year drip-drip-drip of institutional retrenchment that has hollowed out Mexican democracy and left it at the mercy of whoever occupies the presidency.
At the mercy, that is, of Claudia Sheinbaum.
An earlier version of this article first appeared in Persuasion.
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"a mix of ‘70s style resource nationalism and anti-elite posturing in public, layered over a willingness to accommodate elites behind the scenes." -- Why does that sound so familiar?
‘On the security front, despite Mexico’s sky-high crime rate, he champions a policy of “hugs not bullets,” requiring the army and national guard to avoid direct confrontation with organized crime.’ This seems like an indirect endorsement of the Calderón approach of waging war on the cartels, which…didn’t go so well and was the starting point of the current violence.