At the beginning of June, the former mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, won a landslide victory to be Mexico's new president. Discover her relationship with the country's Jewish community in our prescient 2018 report on her

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo leaned forward on the podium as if signalling intimacy. “I would like to comment on something,” the woman who was within weeks of being elected Mexico City’s mayor told a meeting of Jewish women last June, “because, obviously, you already know both my surnames.”

Sheinbaum told the group that her paternal grandparents came to Mexico from Lithuania at the beginning of the last century and her maternal grandparents fled Bulgaria in World War II. She said her Mexican-born parents had raised her without religion, but “obviously we carry our culture in our blood”.

It was a rare reference to her Jewish heritage. The 56-year-old, who will be the first woman, and Jew, to become mayor of Mexico City, hardly talks about herself. If she does she prefers to emphasise her identity as a scientist or as a woman. She studied physics before obtaining a doctorate in environmental engineering from Berkeley, and carving a career focused on air pollution and climate change.

As a politician Sheinbaum stresses her academic profile to send the message that she is untainted by the quagmire of corruption that plagues Mexican politics. She reinforces this with an earnest feminism and an austere look that contrasts with the tendency of women in Mexican politics to favour either hyperfeminised power dressing or bohemian flamboyancy.

While this profile appeals to an influential sector within Mexico City, it would never have won her the July election to govern one of the largest and most complex metropolises in Latin America. That victory was rooted in her long association with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist who won the country’s presidency by a landslide on the same day.

López Obrador has built a large support base over years by tirelessly underlining his commitment to tackling Mexico’s deep injustices. His 2018 election campaign promised to “eliminate corruption” and channel the money saved into scholarships for young people vulnerable to getting sucked into crime. López Obrador defines himself as a nationalist and has also promised to defend migrant rights.

Sheinbaum’s admiration for López Obrador was clear in an interview she gave in early 2018. “Andrés Manuel is a moral reference point for Mexico,” she said. “He is closest to the great pacifists: to Martin Luther King, to Salvador Allende, to Mandela.”

Sheinbaum never considered a political career until López Obrador made her his environment secretary when he was mayor of Mexico City between 2000 and 2005. At the time she was married to a middle-level political leader whom she had met through student politics in the 80s. From then on Sheinbaum’s dedication to the projects López Obrador gave her to oversee turned her into one of his most trusted associates.

She was his spokesperson during his first shot at the presidency in 2006 and accompanied him throughout the wilderness years that followed as well as his failed attempt to win the presidency in 2012. She was there again as he built a new political party – the Movement of National Regeneration (MORENA) – that would finally secure him victory this year.

When he assured her the candidacy for the capital’s mayor, she ran her campaign largely around the pledge to return the capital to the path that he had traced when he was mayor.

Not that López Obrador always makes it easy for Mexico City progressives like Sheinbaum. His quiet but obvious social conservatism became increasingly difficult to ignore when he formed an alliance for the 2018 election with a tiny political party with roots in evangelical churches and leaders who abhor abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

This led some of López Obrador’s inner circle to stage a protest against the alliance. He responded by promising not to roll back rights already established, and affirmed that his movement is inclusive of people from all religions and “free thinkers”.

It was typical of the way Lopez Obrador handles conflicts among his followers. If they turn it into a big enough problem, he issues a statement promising things will be okay, draws a line under it, and moves on.

That was how he handled a row within his party in 2012 about antisemitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, similar to the issues facing the Labour Party in the UK. On that occasion Sheinbaum reportedly insisted he curb the aggressive tweets of his adviser. He did so, and the controversy faded.

Can Mayor Sheinbaum emerge from López Obrador’s shadow? That question is particularly relevant given that the position is almost automatically associated with future presidential ambitions. Is Sheinbaum thinking about the next presidential elections in 2024? “Not for now,” she recently told El Financiero. “I don’t think we should be talking about this now. I am focused on the city.”

By Jo Tuckman

Jo Tuckman was a journalist based in Mexico and author of Mexico: Democracy Interrupted (Yale University Press, 2012). She died in Mexico in 2020.

This article appears in the October 2018 issue of JR.