The Purple Light: The Secret to Claudia Sheinbaum’s Success

Thursday, June 13, 2024

The Secret to Claudia Sheinbaum’s Success

Posted by Steve Beckow

on June 13, 2024

Mexico’s President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum

The New Republic is heavily anti-Trump, but Goldman’s description of President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum’s character and appeal seems impartial and very helpful.

The article is so long that we post an excerpt. AMLO is President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador.

Thanks to Kathleen for bringing the article to my attention.

The Secret to Claudia Sheinbaum’s Success: She Is Not Like AMLO at All

Francisco Goldman, The New Republic, June 6, 2024

(https://newrepublic.com/article/182183/claudia-sheinbaum-mexico-success-not-amlo)

(Excerpt only.)

Yes, Mexico’s president-elect has politics similar to her mentor and predecessor’s. But her very different personal qualities may prove to be more important.

The reticent Sheinbaum seemed not at all like a “normal” politician, though I knew she’d been a good mayor. When people complained or warned that her lack of public charisma, exposed by the relentless campaign spotlight, would make her a vulnerable candidate, I thought that might be true.

But that campaign spotlight worked to Sheinbaum’s advantage, revealing an unlikely political leader who seemed ever more impressive the more attention she received, in the media, in the debates. She exudes an air of serene competence. In fact, her virtues make her seem perfectly poised to counterbalance many of her mentor’s traits, including some of his most obvious flaws. For example, she is always described by those who know her as calmly analytical, making her decisions based on fact rather than on political calculation, emotion, and intuition, like her brazenly ideological and combative mentor.

Sheinbaum was raised inside the Mexico City middle-class left, centered around the great public university known as the UNAM. Her parents, secular nonobservant Jews, offspring of four European immigrants, were activists who participated in the protests that culminated in the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, which, as with so many of her generation, provided the foundation of her understanding of contemporary Mexican political realities.

At the UNAM, Sheinbaum studied physics and later took a Ph.D. in energy engineering. She inevitably became involved in university politics, where her quietly remarkable qualities so stood out that she was pressed by her peers into unsought leadership positions. The internet turns up many photos and video snippets of her childhood and youth: Sheinbaum, hair then tightly curly, giving speeches at the university; images from her 14 years as a ballet student performing in musical folk groups. Like her peers, she read Latin American Boom novels.

Along with millions of other Mexicans, she is the product of a very specific, and rich, Mexico City cultural milieu that requires no other ethnic, racial, or religious qualifiers to describe. Years later, in her presidential campaign in a Mexico where the separation of church and state is rigorously upheld, Sheinbaum’s Jewish secular origin was no more an issue than her being from a secular Protestant or Buddhist background would have been, despite the efforts of such newspapers as The New York Times to highlight her Jewishness as if in the context of U.S. identity obsessions.

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Steve Beckow