“I really feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology professor and main Mexican feminist who has identified Sheinbaum for years, advised me in Mexico Metropolis final week. “She is a lightweight on this horrible scenario that we face: Putin, Trump.”
Lamas stated she’d feared a sexist backlash towards Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first feminine president, however six months into her time period, there’s no signal of 1. Sheinbaum was elected with nearly 60 p.c of the vote. Right this moment her approval ranking is above 80 p.c. Final week, Bukele, who likes to name himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” requested Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the identify of the planet’s hottest chief, evidently anticipating it will be him. Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”
For these of us steeped in American id politics, it may be arduous to know how a girl like Sheinbaum got here to steer the world’s Eleventh-most-populous nation. Her dad and mom, each from Jewish households that fled Europe, have been scientists who’d been energetic within the leftist pupil motion of the Sixties. As a baby, Sheinbaum was devoted to dancing ballet, a self-discipline that also exhibits up in her swish posture and within the many social media movies of her doing people dances along with her constituents. She did analysis for her Ph.D. in vitality engineering at UC Berkeley and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change.
She is, in brief, a part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia sometimes demonized by populist actions. However as I used to be advised many times in Mexico, her rarefied background meant little in gentle of her shut relationship with López Obrador, who she’d labored beside since he was mayor of Mexico Metropolis 25 years in the past, and whose financial populism earned him the enduring devotion of many downtrodden residents.
As president, López Obrador greater than doubled the minimal wage and pegged it to inflation to make sure that employees wouldn’t fall behind. He enacted broad social applications, together with stipends for younger folks doing job coaching and, most necessary, common money transfers for the aged. In accordance to Mexico’s Nationwide Council for the Analysis of Social Improvement Coverage, 5 million Mexicans escaped poverty in the course of the first 4 years of his presidency. (Excessive poverty, nevertheless, elevated by almost half 1,000,000.)
