How has Mexico changed under its first woman president?

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This is the script for my video posted on June 1, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Mexico’s first woman president, a climate scientist named Claudia Sheinbaum, took office in 2024 after a landslide election, just months before a geopolitical development that radically changed its regional environment. That development, of course, was the most recent US presidential election, which resulted in unprecedented tariffs, migration issues, threats against Mexican territory, and instability that have driven much of Sheinbaum’s strategic rationale. So how and why did Sheinbaum become Mexico’s president, and how has she navigated such an uncertain geopolitical environment?

Sheinbaum was born in 1962 to a secular Jewish family of scientists living in Mexico City. Her mother was a biologist and her father was a chemical engineer, and she followed in their footsteps by studying physics, eventually receiving a PhD in energy engineering in 1995. She was actually a prolific climate scientist, having conducted research at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California and authored over 100 articles and two books on energy and the environment. She even contributed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, during the period where it won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In the early 2000s, Sheinbaum entered politics by becoming Mexico City’s environment secretary under Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO, who became her mentor. Since 1989, she had been a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, a social democratic organization, but in 2014 she officially joined AMLO’s center-left Morena party. In 2018, he became president, and she took his former role as mayor of Mexico City around the same time.

In 2023, Sheinbaum announced her resignation as mayor to enter AMLO’s process to select a presidential candidate for his coalition, since he couldn’t run again. He ran five internal polls over about 82 days, and ultimately Sheinbaum won. Immediately the runner-up alleged irregularities and threatened to leave the coalition entirely, and outside observers noted that at best the process bent electoral law, but it also technically ended the old system of the president hand-picking their successor.

In June 2024, Sheinbaum won the election with about 60% of the vote, or about 36m votes, the most ever for a Mexican presidential candidate. Morena’s political coalition won 364 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the Mexican Congress’s lower house, and 83 of 128 seats in the Senate, which became a supermajority when members of the opposition defected. This gave AMLO the power to amend the constitution, and because the new congress was seated a month before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, he used this window to push through key reforms on the judiciary and integrating the National Guard into the military.

Sheinbaum won for several key reasons. First off, she was perceived as an extension of AMLO, whose approval rating was roughly 70-80% when he left office. But she also supported strong social programs for universal pensions for seniors and poverty reduction, and the opposition alliance was ideologically incoherent and perceived as illegitimate.

Some thought that Morena’s supermajority would create a risk of democratic backsliding because of its ability to unilaterally change the constitution, and the judicial reform I mentioned under AMLO was the first test of this theory. It mandated that all federal and state judges be elected by popular vote, it cut the Supreme Court from 11 justices to 9, it shortened terms, and it lowered qualifications. The first batch of elections occurred in June 2025, and voter turnout was the lowest in Mexico’s history at only about 13%. Outside observers said the process was likely to make the judiciary more loyal to the government, and cheat sheets were created to steer voters to specific candidates, including ones who were highly underqualified. But Sheinbaum’s supporters generally think that it roots out corruption and nepotism, and 66% of the Mexican public approved the judicial reform.

Sheinbaum has made other changes too. She’s used the supermajority to enshrine social programs in the constitution, mandate that minimum wage increases stay above inflation, take steps toward universal healthcare, reform the energy industry to increase state control, and eliminate autonomous agencies, including Mexico’s agency for government transparency. Analysts describe her as more disciplined and data-driven than AMLO, but Mexico’s GDP has hardly grown and the fiscal deficit has reached a 36-year high since she took office.

But Sheinbaum’s government has also seen a roughly 40% reduction in homicides, about 40000 arrests for high-impact crimes, and over 320 tons of drugs seized. Violence remains concentrated and severe in a handful of states, and few people approve of her performance on mitigating organized crime and corruption.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s geopolitical environment has shifted dramatically, largely thanks to the US, whose tariffs, border concerns, and counter-drug operations have arguably been Mexico’s main geopolitical concerns since the current US administration entered power. These have continually threatened Mexico’s prosperity and sovereignty, and though Sheinbaum has received praise for navigating them, she has also publicly condemned the US for its actions in Venezuela and its threats to conduct military operations in Mexican territory.

Sheinbaum is well aware that the US, despite its recent volatility, is incredibly important for Mexico to remain close to. She enacted heavy tariffs on imports from non-Free Trade Agreement countries like China, India, and South Korea, mostly to appease concerns from the US and Canada about Chinese transshipment. It also benefits from tens of billions of dollars in foreign direct investment through nearshoring, because so many US companies relocate production to Mexico. It looks like Sheinbaum won’t have nearly as much room to maneuver internationally as she has at home.

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