Claudia Sheinbaum, the woman hoping to be Mexico’s first female president

She was mayor of Mexico’s capital city until last year, when she stepped down to run for president. Yet Claudia Sheinbaum, the pollsters’ favourite to win Sunday’s election, remains something of an enigma. It is an impression that her tightly scripted election appearances have done little to dispel. Is she a scientifically trained technocrat, as her campaign staff suggest? Or an ideologue schooled in far left student movements, as detractors claim?

So who is Sheinbaum? Mexico’s likely next president allows herself a brief laugh when the Financial Times put the question to her in the back seat of her modest Chevrolet saloon as she is driven between campaign rallies.

“I’m part of all that,” she says. “I grew up with the social movements, I grew up as a scientist in my home and with my own career, so clearly I was formed by all those things . . . all my life I have fought for justice in Mexico.”

Sheinbaum, 61, would break several barriers if she wins the election. She would be the first female president in a country with a long history of machismo and the first Mexican leader of Jewish descent.

Described by colleagues as disciplined, focused and hard-working, Sheinbaum grew up in a middle-class home in Mexico City where, she told an authorised biography, “We talked about politics at breakfast, lunch and dinner”.

Her father was a chemical engineer and her mother is a biologist. Both were the children of Jews who left eastern European for Mexico to escape persecution. They kept a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital hidden in a cupboard and took food to leftwing activists imprisoned in jail.

As a student, Sheinbaum helped to lead successful campus protests against the introduction of a modest tuition fee in the 1980s. During this time she also met her first husband, hard-left activist Carlos Ímaz.

“That experience for Sheinbaum was absolutely crucial,” Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, a professor at the Colegio de México, said of the protests. “The aim is to go from ideological radicalism . . . to a mass movement, they managed that.”

Later, while Ímaz was studying at Stanford in 1991, a bandanna-wearing Sheinbaum was captured by cameras protesting against visiting Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, co-architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

More than three decades later, Sheinbaum still bristles with indignation against Salinas’s free-market reforms, which reshaped Mexico’s economy — though she supports the successor to Nafta, the free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the US.

“We lived through 36 years of atrocious impoverishment and inequality,” she says. “And the people of Mexico decided to change that model.”

That change was led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current president and Sheinbaum’s longtime mentor, who took office in 2018 pledging a “fourth transformation” of Mexico — a historic project he compares in importance to independence from colonial Spain.

Sheinbaum has constantly stressed her loyalty to López Obrador, pledging to “build the second storey” of his transformation.

She has form: as López Obrador’s environment secretary while he was mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum oversaw his most important project: building a second storey on the heavily congested ring road.

Although she trained as a climate scientist and was part of the intergovernmental panel of experts whose work won a Nobel Prize, Sheinbaum did not flinch when López Obrador announced the giant road-building plan, offering to help implement it.

Luis Rubio, chairman of the independent México Evalua think-tank said: “She has shown herself to be an efficient administrator but authoritarian and intolerant. On the economy, her philosophy . . . is that the government decides and companies follow.”

Her allies dispute this. “She wouldn’t put her ideology before the question of how to run the economy so it works for the country,” one aide said. “She is a shy person, so she may seem serious but . . . she has an amazing human touch.”

Sheinbaum’s campaign positions her as an investor-friendly candidate who will build on Mexico’s privileged trade access to the US and grow the economy.

Detractors say she will be little more than a yes-woman, answering commands issued by López Obrador from his retirement ranch. Sheinbaum flatly rejects this. In her five years as Mexico City mayor, she tells the FT, “I never received a call [from López Obrador] giving me an instruction”. 

A certain steeliness also shines through when she dismisses qualms about her mentor’s policy of using the army to run federal policing “ . . . there is a civilian commander, which is going to be me”. 

As president, the challenges Sheinbaum would face include a large budget deficit, the calamitous finances of state oil firm Pemex, a high murder rate and the perennially complex relationship between Mexico and the US.

But perhaps her toughest task would be to succeed a charismatic president whose folksy charm and media savvy has kept his ratings in the mid-60s after five and a half years in office, despite relatively weak economic growth and rising violence.

Channelling her activist past, Sheinbaum puts her faith in the masses. “Abraham Lincoln said that democracy is the power of the people by the people and for the people,” she says. “That is what we want . . . let the people decide.”

michael.stott@ft.com; christine.murray@ft.com