Sheinbaum seeks to become the first woman in the country’s history to hold that position, facing the opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez.
Born on June 24, 1962, the granddaughter of Bulgarian and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Sheinbaum was from the beginning the best placed in preliminary polls and, among political circles, she was considered President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s favorite to be the candidate official of the party that they both founded.
gREAT defender of the “fourth transformation” of Mexico, as the president’s political project is called, she has become one of the most important political figures in the country.
“Mexico is ready for a female president, for a female astronaut, for a female engineer. Mexican women have been ready for a long time,” said the capital’s ruler.
In recent months, she has traveled the country showing herself to be very close to the ideas of López Obrador and has avoided positioning herself in controversy and, despite the fact that her opponent Marcelo Ebrard positioned herself frontally as her greatest adversary, the now candidate stayed away from the confrontation.
BEGINNINGS IN POLITICS
Sheinbaum has boasted that her political origins come from childhood, as her parents participated in the 1968 student movement, which fueled her activism.
But his academic training was not political, as he studied Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), as well as a master’s degree in energy engineering and a doctorate in the same specialty.
Her approach to politics began in the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) – of which López Obrador was a presidential candidate on two occasions – to which she joined in 1989, but without participating in the internal structure or organisms.
In the year 2000 he joined the cabinet of López Obrador, when he was head of Government of the then Federal District.
There she served as Secretary of the Environment and in 2006 she became the spokesperson for López Obrador’s first campaign for the presidency of Mexico.
In 2014, Sheinbaum resigned from the PRD to join the National Regeneration Movement.
SURROUNDED BY POLEMICS
One of her first political positions was as a delegate in Tlalpan, a demarcation of the capital, from October 2015 to December 2017.
In that position he lived one of his biggest controversies during the earthquake of September 2017, when a school in the demarcation collapsed in which 19 children and four adults died.
Then, Sheinbaum received accusations of omission for not having noticed the irregularities of the property.
In August 2017, Sheinbaum achieved, after a survey, the candidacy to run for the head of Government of Mexico City, which she won in 2018 with 2.5 million votes and became the first woman in the history of the capital elected for the position.
In October 2022, Sheinbaum first expressed her intentions to run for the presidency of Mexico, although she denied being López Obrador’s favorite.
His political aspirations, however, are surrounded by various controversies, especially the accident that occurred on metro line 12 in May 2021 that left 27 dead and hundreds injured.
They have also accused her of neglecting those affected by the 2017 earthquakes that left hundreds of families homeless in the south of the city.
LÓPEZ OBRADOR’S FAVORITE?
After the 2021 local elections, Morena lost half of the internal mayoralties of the capital to the opposition alliance Va por México, although the ruling party governed practically all the demarcations.
After that, Sheinbaum changed his policy, focusing more on his tours and highlighting the achievements of López Obrador, in addition to shaping his presidential-style speech with concepts such as “adversaries” and the “fourth transformation.”
In September 2021, after the inauguration of a branch of Banco de Bienestar in Tláhuac, the president raised the hand of the then head of government, pointed at her with his right hand and said “it’s her”, something that was interpreted as the revelation presidential.
The Jewish Polititian is now a candidate for the presidency after having contended with former chancellor Marcelo Ebrard; the former Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López; and the former leader of Morena in the Senate, Ricardo Monreal, as main rivals and for the first time in history she will contend another woman. Never before a womans has run for presidency in Mexico.
Translated from EFE and Aurora