Claudia Sheinbaum is a 62-year old environmental scientist who left academia on a political trajectory that took her from a local mayor, to running Mexico City, to winning the presidency with nearly 60 percent of the vote.
MEXICO CITY—Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, takes office on Tuesday as Mexico’s 66th president and its first female leader. Sheinbaum, who won the election in June in a landslide, assumes the presidency amid high expectations and enormous challenges, including endemic cartel violence and a large national deficit.
The political protege of popular outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum has a reputation for being analytical, disciplined and unflappable.She campaigned on a promise to continue López Obrador’s legacy—a complicated one that is hard to fit into an ideological box. Supporters hail his popular social programs to help the poor; detractors accuse him of undermining the country’s fledgling democracy. Here are five things to know about Sheinbaum:She is Mexico’s first female president
Sheinbaum’s presidency marks two milestones: she is the first female president in Mexico’s history and also the first with Jewish heritage.
In a conservative country led by men for more than two centuries, Sheinbaum’s victory underscores the advances women have made in the political sphere. It is also notable given Mexico’s problems with gender-based violence—it has one of the highest rates of murder against women in the world. Sheinbaum said as president she would create an anti-femicide prosecutor’s office, a measure she implemented when she was mayor of Mexico City. But she has dodged detailing her position on abortion rights and feminists criticized her campaign for lacking gender-specific policies.
Sheinbaum’s election is also notable for her Jewish heritage. Her grandparents emigrated to Mexico from Lithuania and Bulgaria. Sheinbaum says she is proud of her ancestry but not religiously affiliated.
Even so, her ascension is remarkable given that Jews comprise less than one percent in a country with an overwhelmingly Catholic population, one of the largest in the world. She is a climate scientist
The 62-year-old has a PhD in energy engineering and in the early 1990s studied at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in northern California.
