Mexico's leftist presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, wearing a typical Mexican hat. Photo: EFE.
At the end of a long electoral campaign, 97 million Mexicans will go to the polls on Sunday, June 2, to elect the next president of the country. This time, it will most likely be the first woman president of Mexico, as leftist candidate Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is considered to be the favorite to win the election.
Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, is the candidate for the presidency from the ruling coalition, led by the Movement for National Regeneration (MORENA). She is a physicist who graduated from the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Sheinbaum, the first woman chief of government of Mexico City (2018-2023) and possible successor of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also has a PhD in environmental engineering. In 2007 she was one of the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of experts that, within the framework of the United Nations (UN), provides information and advice to governments and the public on climate change and its effects.
Her candidacy resulted from the internal primaries of MORENA, which has been led since 2000 by current President López Obrador, whom Sheinbaum accompanied as secretary of the Environment during his term as head of the government of Mexico City (Federal District, during 2000-2006).
Claudia is the daughter of Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz and Annie Pardo Cema. Carlos Sheinbaum’s family came to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s, while Annie Pardo hails from a Sephardic family from the city of Sofia in Bulgaria, that went to Mexico in the 1940s, fleeing the Holocaust.
The presidential hopeful’s parents were part of the Mexican left and became involved in political activism in the 1960s. Claudia Sheinbaum studied in public schools and went on to complete her studies in Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
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Claudia Sheinbaum’s government program
The government program of the ruling party’s candidate centers around the continuation of the current economic program, which she defined as “humanist,” and which includes an increase in the minimum wage to an annual rate of 11% and the policy of social programs of the López Obrador administration, which, according to Sheinbaum, contributed to the reduction of poverty in Mexico.
As part of her economic program, prepared by Gerardo Esquivel, who was the deputy governor of the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) during López Obrador’s government, Sheinbaum proposes an average annual growth target of 3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2024 and 2030.
She speaks of “preserving a reasonable balance between the debt and the GDP” and making a “responsible and transparent” use of resources to improve the country’s infrastructure. She also emphasizes the autonomy of Banxico. Coming from a strong environmentalist background, the MORENA candidate also proposes a reasonable transition from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energies through the substitution of internal combustion vehicles for hybrid and electric ones.
The candidate has promised to defend Mexicans wherever they are, and especially the migrants in the United States, where immigration policies dramatically affect these people. In this regard, she offered to continue collaborating with the US government in migratory matters and for protecting the rights of her compatriots.
If elected president, one of the biggest challenges that Sheinbaum will face is violence and insecurity that arises from narco-trafficking and other forms of organized crime that have been entrenched in powerful economic, political and social sectors for over two decades.
All the latest opinion polls, carried out by media outlets like Reforma, El Universal, La Jornada, Bloomberg, and polling firms such as Enkoll, Demotecnía and others, project Sheinbaum as receiving 50-60% of the votes, placing her 20 points or more above her nearest rival, right-wing Broad Front for Mexico’s candidate Xóchitl Gálvez.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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