Claudia Sheinbaum elected president of Mexico, breaking barriers as woman and Jew
Claudia Sheinbaum of arrives to give a speech after the first results released by Mexican election authorities show her with a commanding lead in the presidential election on June 03, 2024, in Mexico City, Mexico. (Hector Vivas/Getty Images)
Claudia Sheinbaum swept to victory in Mexico’s presidential election Sunday, giving the country of more than 120 million a woman leader and a Jewish leader for the first time.
Sheinbaum’s election makes Mexico by far the biggest country to have a Jewish head of state. Only Israel (9.5 million) and Ukraine (38 million) currently have Jewish leaders.
Sheinbaum’s Jewish background barely came up on the campaign trail. But she has always been open about her family’s story: Sheinbaum had Ashkenazi grandparents who immigrated from Lithuania in the 1920s and Sephardic grandparents who left Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She has said that she celebrated holidays at her grandparents’ houses, but at home with her political activist parents, her family life was secular.
Home to an estimated 50,000 Jews, Mexico is known for having multiple tight-knit Jewish communities, many of which don’t mingle much. Sheinbaum — who married her second husband, Jesús María Tarriba, in November — is not part of any of them.
“She’s not seen as, let’s say, one of us,” Daniel Fainstein, the dean of Jewish Studies at the Hebraica University in Mexico City, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year. “I think that she’s seen as someone from Jewish origins that is developing her work as an academician and then as a politician.”
More recently, Tessy Schlosser, director of the Jewish Documentation and Research Center of Mexico, told the Associated Press that Sheinbaum’s identity is clear within the local Jewish community. “Claudia has actively tried to say: ‘This is not me,” she said. “It must be respected when a person does not want to be identified in one way or another.”
Still, her election marks a departure in a country where the overwhelming majority of people identify as Catholic. She faced some antisemitism on the campaign trail when her detractors characterized her as not fully Mexican, including former President Vicente Fox, who called her a “Bulgarian Jew” in an apparent attempt to minimize her candidacy. He apologized, but made a similar comment after Sheinbaum briefly donned a rosary with a crucifix after being given one during a campaign stop last fall. “JEWISH AND FOREIGN AT THE SAME TIME,” Fox tweeted. Sheinbaum has produced her birth certificate multiple times to dispel rumors that she was born in Bulgaria.
“What has been said about Claudia Sheinbaum on some occasions is very close to antisemitism,” Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, a Mexican sociologist at the University of California San Diego, told JTA last year.
A climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum, 61, campaigned on a promise to continue the liberal policies of her political mentor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s popular outgoing president. The preliminary vote total showed her winning nearly 60% of votes, more than twice as much as the first runner-up, who conceded.
“For the first time in 200 years of the republic, I will become the first female president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said in a speech delivered early Monday in Mexico City. “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.”
Israel and the war in Gaza
Among the most pressing challenges facing Mexico’s next president are crime, energy policy and managing its northern border with the United States. The president will also have a chance to decide whether to follow through with Lopez Obrador’s past promise to recognize an independent Palestine, a symbolic move that more than 140 countries have already made.
Sheinbaum has not commented publicly on the issue, even as pro-Palestinian sentiment has strengthened in Mexico, home to about as many Palestinians as Jews, during the current Israel-Hamas war. (The country is home to an estimated 30,000 Palestinians; pro-Palestinian protesters set fire outside the Israeli embassy in Mexico City last week.)
But she has previously put a stance on the record about Israeli military action in Gaza — in a letter to the editor of La Jornada, a major Mexico City newspaper, in January 2009, when she was a professor and Israel and Gaza were locked in what would ultimately be a three-week war. In it, she cited her Jewish background in making an argument that could apply just as easily today.
“Because of my Jewish origin, because of my love for Mexico and because I feel like a citizen of the world, I share with millions the desire for justice, equality, fraternity and peace, and therefore, I can only see with horror the images of the state bombings,” she wrote at the time, adding, “No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians … Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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