Mexico’s first female president to take power under mentor’s shadow

On paper, Mexico’s incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum will become one of the world’s most powerful women when she takes office this week.

She will enjoy a working supermajority in congress, significant control of the courts and a beefed-up military as she takes charge of a country that is the US’s biggest trading partner.

In practice though, the life-long leftwing activist faces mounting challenges, including questions over the future of the country’s democracy and its investment grade credit rating.

She will have to navigate these obstacles under the shadow of her political mentor, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Since Sheinbaum’s landslide victory in June, the charismatic outgoing leader has appeared to undermine her, announcing likely members of her cabinet and pushing through a major judicial overhaul that she will have to implement.

She has joined the leftwing nationalist each week on his farewell tour, where supporters buy “amlito” dolls and shout “Don’t leave!” to the popular leader.

“The message from López Obrador from the moment that Claudia Sheinbaum won the election . . . is that [her] triumph is because of him,” said Humberto Beck, Professor at El Colegio de México’s Center for International Studies. “He won’t allow any deviation.”

Investors and the media are speculating over whether Sheinbaum, a former academic, may secretly want to pursue more moderate policies than her increasingly radical predecessor, who billed his rule as bringing about a “fourth transformation” of Mexico on a par with its war of independence.

But in her own speeches Sheinbaum promises “no regressions” and has endorsed López Obrador’s policies of increasing social welfare programmes, empowering the military and pushing ahead with a sweeping reform to elect all the country’s judges.

Like many of his supporters, she refers to the nationalist president in reverential, quasi-religious terms, even promoting the book he plans to write from the solitude of his rural ranch.

“We all have to preserve his legacy,” she told the ruling Morena party’s congress this month. “We have his books, speeches, documentary, conference and everyday teachings . . . thank you president, forever!”

With the congressional and party leadership, half her cabinet and millions of supporters seen as more loyal to him than her, any moves by Sheinbaum to diverge from López Obrador on policy would have to be highly strategic, analysts said.

“If she allows him to impose his agenda, she will be a very weak president . . . and criticised for it, but if she doesn’t do it, she could also be weak or suffer an onslaught from her own troops,” said José del Tronco, a professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty.

“We don’t know if she will be good at playing the strategic, cautious chess game she’ll need to play.”

A former student activist who grew up in leftwing academic circles in the capital, Sheinbaum has been a loyal ally of López Obrador for more than 20 years.

She stuck by him through three presidential campaigns and the building of Morena, before running the capital as a relatively low-profile mayor for four and a half years until 2023.

During her term homicides dropped, but record numbers of people went missing; she electrified public transport, but construction slumped after a crackdown on permits.

Since her days in a student movement run by men, Sheinbaum’s career has been marked by discretion in male-dominated environments, said political analyst Blanca Heredia.

“She doesn’t seek the limelight,” she said. “She’s strategic, ambitious . . . and builds strong relationships built on trust.”

Her communication and management styles are markedly different from her mentor. Her recent press conferences have mostly lasted under an hour, compared with two to three for López Obrador’s notorious morning news conferences.

Where the charismatic president naturally throws in local slang and cultural references, going off on long tangents, Sheinbaum’s answers are more direct. She has a reputation as a demanding manager.

“Based on what Claudia did in Mexico City, I don’t think there will be any frontal confrontation,” said Heredia. “[She’ll] put her own stamp on his policies.”

However, López Obrador has built a structure around his successor that will make it hard for her to stray from his doctrine. After vowing to retire to his rural ranch after stepping down, in recent weeks he has said he would stick around in the capital “to acclimatise for a few days”.

Despite his popularity, he has also left forbidding problems for Sheinbaum to tackle. Mexico’s economy is slowing sharply despite high government spending, with fears increasing that the investment grade status the country has held since 2000 could be at risk.

Organised crime has taken control of parts of the country; the combined number of homicides and missing people has reached record highs, and residents of major cities from Culiacán to Tuxtla Gutiérrez live in fear.

The electricity grid is also buckling. Before becoming a politician, Sheinbaum was a physicist specialising in energy. The sector is hoping that she will quietly move away from López Obrador’s nationalist, fossil-fuel-driven policies and speed up the country’s green transition.

“That’s probably the area where we expect most change,” said Kimberley Sperrfechter, emerging markets analyst at Capital Economics. “The problem is she’ll be constrained by Mexico’s public finances.”

The first signal of how closely Sheinbaum will hew to López Obrador’s line is likely to come in November, when she will have to present a budget with a steep cut to Mexico’s ballooning fiscal deficit to keep public finances under control.

Investors will be watching how much budget she assigns to state oil giant Pemex and whether she will take difficult political decisions to meet fiscal demands.

She also has just months until elections in June 2025 to replace half the nation’s federal judges, giving her little time to assuage investors’ escalating fears that the move will pose a serious risk to the rule of law.

The US presidential elections in November may present another major stumbling block: while Sheinbaum has said that the North American trade deal, USMCA, is “fundamental”, Donald Trump, the Republican candidate and former president, is threatening to impose tariffs on US companies if they invest south of the border.

Del Tronco said Sheinbaum may only show her true colours if the external environment gets too difficult.

“Will she be willing to sacrifice herself for the cause of López Obrador’s [transformation]?” he asked. “Or will she want to survive . . . and sacrifice her father like all consequential leaders do?”