Let's not lose hope. There are still politicians like the Mexican Claudia Sheinbaum. It's worth pausing to consider this figure who has ridiculed Ayuso. She has been president of her country for a year and a half – before that, she was mayor of Mexico City (2018-2023) – and her popularity hovers around 70% as an average approval rating in polls: she is one of the most popular leaders in the world. The magazine Time has included her this year among the 100 most influential personalities on the planet.
She is popular without resorting to populist demagoguery. She educates about social justice. She publicly explains her political choices with data and science. It's evident she has a solid academic background as a physicist and environmental engineer. What policies have defined her so far? A plan to build one million homes, the reduction of the female retirement age to 60 in a country with significant gender bias, the reform of the judicial power so that judges are elected in elections, as happens in the U.S., and the crackdown on the illegal trafficking of fentanyl to the U.S., which has been reduced by 50% and has led to the deployment of 100,000 agents on the northern border.
Against drug trafficking, she has created the National Intelligence Agency and has promoted social and educational policies to steer young people away from crime: she emphasizes public education as a pillar of social cohesion and progress. Mexico has great youth potential, although the birth rate is declining: it is now 1.8 children per woman (in Catalonia it's at rock bottom: 1.08).
I would love to have a figure like her in Catalonia, in Spain, in Europe. The last serious female politician on our continent was the conservative Angela Merkel. We have never had a female president here. In Madrid, they have Ayuso, who is the exact opposite of Sheinbaum, who has scorned her for the Spaniard's defense of the genocidal conqueror Hernán Cortés during his visit to Mexican lands. Sheinbaum does not back down from the Trumpist global right. She was one of the first to stand up to the rhetorical and economic aggression of the American president. She is a benchmark as an ideological alternative to global ultra-regression.
The Mexican president is a scientist: the first person to earn a doctorate from UNAM in energy engineering. In times of climate deniers, this is important. She is the daughter of left-wing militants from the May '68 movement, also scientists: her mother was a renowned biologist, her father a chemical engineer (and a businessman in the leather industry). As a child, Claudia was headed for a career as a dancer, a very demanding activity. She dedicated 14 years to it. In the end, she opted for university life, during which time she was on the rowing team. Also in a protest song group.
She has built a political career after working as a researcher, with a four-year research stay in California, at Stanford University. Ideologically, she is a social democrat: she believes in public service, in the State's control of major sectors within a regulated market economy, with public-private collaboration. Her Mexican nationalism is inclusive and pluralistic.
In Mexico's political culture, the reception of Spanish Republicans remains a reference point that she knows firsthand, as her first husband, Carlos Imaz Gispert, was the son of an exiled Catalan woman, Montserrat Gispert Cruells. Her maternal grandparents (from Lithuania) and paternal grandparents (from Bulgaria) were Jews who fled Europe, but she no longer had a religious upbringing. In November 2023, a year before becoming president, she remarried an old university boyfriend, also a scientist, Jesús María Tarriba, who works at the Bank of Mexico, specializing in financial risks.
Claudia Sheinbaum was part of the founding core, in 2012, of Morena (National Regeneration Movement), a progressive anti-corruption party, which had the previous Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), as its promoter, and which today has twelve million members. Sheinbaum grew politically hand-in-hand with AMLO since 2000. Disciplined and methodical, technocratic and scientific, progressive and environmentalist, she is a public servant who restores our faith in politics.
