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MEXICO CITY.- In Mexico there are two big questions about Claudia Sheinbaum. The first is whether he will distance himself from his political boss, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who promoted her to the presidency. The second, tied to the first, is whether his government will be more moderate than that of the president, or more radical. His history, his style, and his path to the top of power in Mexico – certainly different from those of López Obrador – provide some clues.
Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, 61, was born in Mexico City to a left-wing, upper-middle-class family. His mother was a biology teacher; her father, a chemical engineer. Her grandparents were Lithuanian and Bulgarian Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in Europe early in the last century, although her upbringing was secular, and she has downplayed that ancestry. Sheinbaum grew up studying French and ballet in a scientific, cultured, and with a clear political imprint that will now take to the National Palace.
As a girl, Sheinbaum thought that her life would be dedicated to academia, but politics was always present. He grew up in the midst of the upheaval of the 60s and 70s, in a home with a strong political commitment. –her mother used to take her with her to see her student leader friends imprisoned by the PRI–, which later spilled over to her time as a student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the most important public university in Mexico.
At the student center, Sheinbaum met her first husband, sociologist Carlos Imaz, with whom she started a family and moved to San Francisco, in the United States, in the early 90s, where she studied at Stanford and Berkeley. They divorced in 2016 and Last year Sheinbaum married for the second time with Jesús María Tarriba, an expert in financial risks. Her academic and scientific training is extensive: She studied physics and engineering, was a researcher at UNAM and one of the scientists awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for the fight against climate change, along with Al Gore.
His life took a turn in 2000. López Obrador, recently elected mayor of Mexico City with the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), was looking for someone with a technical profile for the Ministry of the Environment to deal with the historical contamination of the Mexican capital. The chosen one was Sheinbaum.
She and her first husband had joined the ranks of the PRD from their student militancy at the UNAM, unlike López Obrador, who trained in the ranks of the PRI. Since then, His political career was intertwined with that of López Obradorwho will now succeed as president after successfully selling a continuity with change in the “fourth transformation”, the “4T”, the flagship project of the workshop. Sheinbaum showed herself throughout the campaign as the heir and guarantor of that project.
“The question is what this new way of having continuity, and at the same time a change, will be like. And that is the main question about Sheinbaum’s political profile, and How will he execute it with a shadow as big, as powerful as that of López Obrador?“, Salvador Camarena, Mexican journalist and columnist, tells LA NACION.
Camarena divides Sehinbaum’s political life in two: First, his family and his beginnings in student politics, a stage very far from López Obrador; then, the link with the leader and creator of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), its political boss, a relationship that, he emphasizes, is indissoluble. Denisse Dresser, an intellectual critic of Obradorism, called it “the obedient daughter” of López Obrador. His arrival to power opens a third stage, in which a inevitable tensionas has already happened in other political successions between figures from the same political party in other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Argentina – between Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, or between Cristina Kirchner and Alberto Fernández –, or Colombia.
“She is a person with her own ideas, except that she has lived 24, 25 years without exactly revealing those ideas because He has dedicated himself politically to contributing to what his ideological boss wanted. Mexicans know about her that she is thorough, disciplined, methodical, very determinedand that her character is strong and becomes intemperate with her collaborators,” Camarena describes her.
“But they also know that if she succeeded as president without betraying the ideology of the lopezobradorismwill have to take measures that could challenge the ideological component of López Obrador”he anticipates.
López Obrador never wore a mask during the pandemic. Sheinbaum, yes. López Obrador is a pragmatic politician and a born, charismatic oratorcapable of spending hours talking behind a lectern. Sheinbaum, whom many call “the doctor,” lacks that charisma and magnetism. A video that circulated widely on social media during the campaign shows her trying to shake off supporters while trying to close a car door. “Take your hand away,” she tells a person, visibly upset. López Obrador does not speak English, and has shown little interest in the world; Sheinbaum is bilingual, he lived outside of Mexico. Almost no one expects her to continue with “la mañanera,” López Obrador’s daily conference at the National Palace in which the president could spend up to three hours talking about his government.
For Sheinbaum, the challenge in the National Palace is twofold: She will be the first female president in the history of Mexico, and the successor of the creator of the movement that brought her to power. In a recent interview with the Spanish newspaper The countrythey asked her if it didn’t bother her that she was put in the shadow of a man, her first husband, before, in her time in the PRD, or, now, López Obrador.
“It would bother me if I wasn’t sure of myself.”, Sheinbaum starts his response. “What he says responds in part to a sexist culture and, on the other hand, it is the usual criticism of the opposition. Since they have nothing against me, absolutely nothing, then They invent things like that I am going to close churches or end private property or that I am going to be in the shadow of López Obrador”, he continues, before leaving his conclusion: “Something that is not true, because, among other things, the one who is going to govern is me.”
