Claudia Sheinbaum leaves the head of government of Mexico City this Friday as the favorite to be the candidate of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) for the presidency in 2024with which she seeks to become the first woman in the history of the country to hold that position.
Born June 24, 1962, Sheinbaum is the best placed in the preliminary polls and, among political circles, She is considered the favorite of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to be the official candidate of the party that they both founded.
Wide defender of the “fourth transformation” of Mexico, as the president’s political project is called, He has become one of the most important political figures with the best chances of succeeding López Obrador as president.
Mexico is ready for a president, for an astronaut, for an engineer. Mexican women have been ready for a long time,” said the capital’s ruler.
Sheinbaum’s beginnings in politics
Sheinbaum has boasted that his political origins come from childhoodsince his parents participated in the student movement of 1968, which boosted his activism.
But his academic training was not political, He studied Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)in addition to 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.
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In 2000 he joined the cabinet of López Obradorwhen 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.
A history shrouded in controversy
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.
The pandemic also brought the president a controversy over the supply of Ivermectin from the Government of Mexico City to more than 200,000 patients through a medical kit as part of a study to treat covid-19.
AMLO’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 the 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”, which was interpreted as the revelation presidential.
Until now, it is the best positioned in the polls to choose the presidential candidate of Morena, above former chancellor Marcelo Ebrard; the former Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, and the former leader of Morena in the Senate, Ricardo Monreal.
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