Claudia Sheinbaum’s checklist 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 develop into the nation’s first feminine president.
However she has a picture downside, and he or she 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 character,” 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 day-after-day.”
With the Mexican election simply days away, Ms. Sheinbaum is going through a elementary dilemma.
She insists she is going to govern independently from her mentor, Mr. López Obrador, and has some completely different priorities. However veering too removed from his agenda could possibly be very dangerous.
She and Mr. López Obrador are “completely different individuals,” 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 utterly with him, and by backing strikes like his large wager on the nationwide oil firm and constitutional modifications 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 bought 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 professional 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 now not there?” Ms. Magaloni stated. “Nobody is aware of.”
The opposite high contender is a girl named Xóchitl Gálvez, a tech entrepreneur who’s representing a number of opposition events. However with Ms. Sheinbaum main the polls by 20 proportion 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 motive 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 will probably be remembered for doubling the minimal wage and lifting hundreds of thousands out of poverty, but additionally for empowering the navy, prioritizing fossil fuels and pushing measures that critics say may weaken Mexico’s democratic establishments.
His successor stands to inherit a protracted checklist 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 simpler in reducing irregular crossings,” Juan Ramón de la Fuente, a member of her marketing campaign crew who’s seen as her likeliest choose for international minister, stated in an interview.
Some in Washington have privately questioned whether or not Mexico’s cooperation on migration may lag after the nation’s elections, however Mr. de la Fuente batted away these issues. “We are going to proceed with the identical, I might say, rigor making an attempt to comprise these flows of migrants,” he stated.
A former ballet dancer, Ms. Sheinbaum calls herself “obsessive” and “disciplined.” However self-discipline is probably not sufficient, analysts say.
Mr. López Obrador is a generational political expertise who constructed his occasion right into a juggernaut by counting on the drive of his character. When his coalition turned fractious, he used his monumental 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, making an attempt 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 likewise 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 turned clear is that Ms. Sheinbaum has lengthy appeared extra comfy quietly getting issues executed than promoting herself or her achievements.
The granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who fled Europe, she hardly ever discusses being Jewish or virtually something about her private life, colleagues say. When interviewers ask her in regards to 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 employees 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 completely comfy revealing his internal emotional state to the world. Practically 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 international minister who’s now on Ms. Sheinbaum’s marketing campaign crew, stated in an interview. A one-time rival of Ms. Sheinbaum’s throughout the occasion, Mr. Ebrard didn’t imply this negatively. Hers is “a special form of management,” he stated, which can be “extra environment friendly” than personality-driven.
For some Mexicans, a thrills-free girl could also be a super 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 faculty 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 at all times “a severe woman,” 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 scholar charges and alter admissions. She married one of many leaders of the motion and had a toddler with him.
Within the early 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 cut back air pollution,” she recalled Mr. López Obrador telling her. “Are you aware how to try this?”
Ms. Sheinbaum, who by then had written greater than a dozen experiences on vitality use and carbon emissions, stated sure. She turned his setting minister. In conferences, she appeared prepared to do virtually something to make her boss pleased, in accordance with a number of individuals who labored together with her.
“The phrase she used time 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, in accordance with Mr. Heredia: “We’re not 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 discovered that Ms. Sheinbaum, the local weather professional, was overseeing the capital’s large new funding: constructing an elevated freeway throughout Mexico Metropolis. The undertaking would simply encourage individuals to drive extra, critics stated.
On the time, Ms. Sheinbaum stated that the brand new street diminished air pollution by easing site visitors, although consultants say it’s arduous to corroborate that declare. One 2018 examine stated the impact on emissions was “not vital” as a result of regardless that congestion was decrease, the variety of automobiles elevated.
In 2006, Mr. López Obrador ran for president and misplaced by lower than one proportion 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 occasion Mr. López Obrador belonged to.
“However she was there with him,” Mr. Acosta Naranjo stated, “dwelling 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 at all times stayed near Mr. López Obrador. When he based his Morena occasion in 2014, he requested her to run on the occasion’s ticket to develop 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 he or she turned Mexico Metropolis’s mayor. She shortly gained a fame 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 may 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 licensed to talk publicly, stated that she was fast to anger at occasions and would yell at her subordinates in entrance of huge teams. By means of a spokesman, Ms. Sheinbaum declined to touch upon the accusation.
Mr. Cano, the biographer, stated that when he requested Ms. Sheinbaum in regards to 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 individuals.”
Her defenders say some individuals merely reacted badly to a girl in cost.
“I do know that in her authorities, generally individuals bought 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 crew. “But when a person yells, it wouldn’t be a difficulty as a result of culturally, it’s completely different.”
“Folks say it in a essential means: ‘She’s powerful,’” Ms. Aragón stated. “What would you like, somebody tender in command of town?”
By the point Covid hit Mexico, Ms. Sheinbaum had eked out some area to manipulate her personal means, empowering technocrats over occasion loyalists and investing within the police to battle 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 usually are not at all times aligned.
Mr. López Obrador hardly ever wore masks in public, advised two amulets would shield him from Covid and didn’t emphasize nationwide testing. Ms. Sheinbaum examined aggressively and pushed mask-wearing.
However when scientific rules conflicted together with her loyalty, Ms. Sheinbaum selected loyalty.
As Christmas approached in 2020, with hospital beds operating low, the federal authorities misled residents in regards to the severity of the virus within the capital, saying it hadn’t reached the essential degree of contagion that may have required a full lockdown. The capital stayed open for weeks.
Ms. Sheinbaum may have shut town down earlier, however didn’t. The end result was an unlimited outbreak.
An impartial fee this 12 months known as the episode “some of the severe 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 through the marketing campaign has been a form of Rorschach check 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 consultants to her marketing campaign crew, her vow to advertise renewable vitality and her openness to re-evaluating the navy’s growth into public enterprises.
However she has additionally gotten behind a number of the president’s most contentious concepts.
In February, Mr. López Obrador put forth a set of profound modifications to the structure, together with eliminating impartial regulators and requiring Supreme Courtroom justices to be elected by standard vote. The transfer provoked alarm amongst critics, who stated the president was making an attempt 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 modifications to the judiciary.
“I wouldn’t say it’s essentially the highest precedence,” he stated, including that Morena would want to win a supermajority in Congress to push the measures by way of, one thing occasion officers see as unlikely.
Between Ms. Sheinbaum and Mr. López Obrador, he added, “There will probably be no confrontation, however there will probably be no submission.”
For years, the candidate has tried to clarify how she could be so in line with the president whereas additionally being herself. The reply, she says, is straightforward: 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 girl 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 simply’re copying them; you simply agree with the concepts,” she stated. “You’ll be able to’t deny what you imagine.”
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico Metropolis.
