Here are five key insights into Mexico’s new president as people wonder whether she will diverge from Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s policies or focus on cementing his legacy.
Claudia Sheinbaum’s list of accolades is long: She has a Ph.D in energy engineering, participated in a United Nations panel of climate scientists awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and governed the capital, one of the largest cities in the hemisphere.
On Sunday, she added another achievement to her résumé: becoming the first woman elected president of Mexico.
Ms. Sheinbaum, 61, captured at least 58 percent of the vote in a landmark election on Sunday that featured two women competing for the nation’s highest office — a groundbreaking contest in a country long known for a culture of machismo and rampant violence against women.
“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” she said. “And as I have said on other occasions, I do not arrive alone. We all arrived, with our heroines who gave us our homeland, with our ancestors, our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.”
Now that she has clinched the presidency, Ms. Sheinbaum’s next hurdle will be stepping out of the shadow of her predecessor and longtime mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the outgoing president.
She and Mr. López Obrador are “different people,” she said in an interview. He’s an oilman who invested in environmentally questionable projects; she’s a climate scientist. Yet Ms. Sheinbaum has appealed to voters mainly by promising to cement his legacy, backing moves like his big bet on the national oil company and proposed constitutional changes that critics call antidemocratic.
