President-elect Claudia Scheinbaum shatters Mexico’s political glass ceiling

From the moment former Mexico City mayor Claudia Scheinbaum announced her candidacy for president, the outcome was in little doubt.

During a long and often gruelling campaign, she crisscrossed the country on private planes, but her double-digit lead in the polls should have given her peace of mind that she was on track to make history.

She has now achieved that goal, becoming Mexico’s first female president by an overwhelming margin.

It’s a watershed moment for Mexico and for her: She’s already Mexico City’s first female mayor, and in a few months she’ll take over at the National Palace, succeeding her mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known by his initials Amuro.

Whatever happens next in her political career, and where her six years in power take her, she will always be the woman who broke the glass ceiling in Mexican politics — no small feat given the country’s deeply rooted patriarchy and ingrained masculinity.

But with campaign fliers tossed in the trash and signs bearing her face taken down, Mexicans could be forgiven for wondering what kind of president she would be. In a campaign filled with words and speeches, there were few policy details and almost no concrete details about governing.

During her campaign, she repeatedly repeated her guiding principle of building a “second floor” of her ally Lopez Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” political project.

President Lopez Obrador and his supporters call his movement the “Fourth Transformation” or “4T” because they equate it with three transformative moments in Mexican history: independence in 1810, the 1858 War of Reforms (and separation of church and state), and the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

Not surprisingly, critics say that Mr. Lopez Obrador, and by extension Mr. Sheinbaum, are delusional with such a title. But 4T stands for a set of hugely popular social policies across Mexico: universal pensions, student grants and family allowances. The policies have lifted an estimated 5 million people out of poverty nationwide, though poverty remains widespread in many areas.

“The essence of this reform is to separate economic and political power,” she told the BBC in an interview in the eastern state of Veracruz. “Economic power has a way to go, but government must be directed towards the poor of Mexico.”

She said President Lopez Obrador laid the foundation and constructed the first floor of the project. “Now we will build on the changes he has brought to the country.”

“That means more rights, a welfare state, access to education, health, housing, and a minimum wage that is a right, not a privilege,” she added. “That’s the difference between neoliberalism and our model, which we call Mexican humanism.”

In essence, she ran on a position of continuity and vowed to double down on President Lopez Obrador’s policies, and her victory shows that this was a proposal supported by a sizable majority of Mexican voters.

Still, her critics, particularly the second-place candidate, Xochitl Gálvez, have charged that the Fourth Party is merely populist, and suggested that Scheinbaum is not an independent woman and would live under the authoritarian shadow of a leader.

A vote for Scheinbaum would ensure Amuro’s election, critics suggested.

But while some Mexican commentators seem to expect her to blindly follow the lead of her popular predecessor, that may not necessarily be the case: There have been many recent examples in Latin America of supposed protégés defying expectations and forging their own path.

Scheinbaum herself denies the accusations: “I intend to govern with the same principles as Lopez Obrador, which is good for the Mexican people,” she told the BBC.

A sophisticated technocrat from a well-to-do Jewish family whose maternal grandparents fled the Holocaust, she presents a very different character from Amro, and their rhetorical styles are very different: Amro is loud and assertive, captivating his followers, while she tends to be more measured and terse.

She speaks fluent English, completed her doctoral dissertation in California, and before entering politics was a distinguished environmental scientist with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

She will therefore be more comfortable on the world stage than her predecessor, whose success stemmed in part from his direct connections with ordinary people, especially in indigenous regions and in his home state of Tabasco.

Lopez Obrador, meanwhile, has stressed he has no plans to interfere in her administration and is looking forward to retirement at his ranch in the southern state of Chiapas.

Still, regardless of how their relationship develops after he leaves office, most expect Sheinbaum to make significant improvements in the key area of ​​security.

Even her most ardent supporters, from the campaign launch to her victory party – both of which took place in Mexico City’s main square, the Zocalo – said they wanted to see more done to crack down on violent crime in a country plagued by drug violence.

Sheinbaum wants to reduce the murder rate from 23.3 to about 19.4 per 100,000 residents by 2027, which would put Mexico on par with Brazil.

She points out that during her term as mayor of Mexico City, statistics showed the capital’s murder rate fell by 50 percent.

But one academic who served as a security adviser to her campaign said her team recognized that strategies that work for running cities may not simply apply at the national level.

As a reminder of just how high the stakes are, this was the most violent election in Mexico’s modern history.

In the final moments of the mayoral campaign for the small town of Coyuca de Benitez, Alfredo Cabrera approached the stage to deliver his closing speech and was shaking hands with his supporters when suddenly, a gunman appeared from behind and shot the opposition candidate in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

About 15 gunshots rang out as the crowd fled in panic. The gunman was shot dead by security forces at the scene.

Cabrera was the last of dozens of candidates killed in the race. His death was a bloody and horrific end to this most brutal of votes. As Cabrera lay in a pool of blood in western Mexico, Claudia Scheinbaum urged her supporters on stage in Mexico City to “make history.”

That phase is over. Now, to control the violence of the drug cartels, she must succeed where her predecessors failed.