Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump?

Opinion|Is Claudia Sheinbaum the Anti-Trump?

Last year was a bad one for incumbent political parties, as voters worldwide rebelled against representatives of the status quo. It was a bad year for the left, with Donald Trump winning in the United States and reactionary nativism advancing across Europe. And it was a bad year for women in politics; as the BBC reported, in 60 percent of the countries that had elections in 2024, the number of women in legislatures fell.

One country, however, bucked all these trends: Mexico, where Claudia Sheinbaum, heir apparent of the flamboyantly disruptive left-wing leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, won the presidency in a landslide.

A secular Jewish climate scientist, Sheinbaum is in many ways the antithesis of the swaggering strongmen who make this moment in world politics feel so suffocating. I’m talking not just about Trump and Vladimir Putin, but also the new techno-caudillos of Latin America, figures like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei, who combine far-right politics with the postmodern smirk of message-board trolls.

Around the globe, liberal humanism is faltering while the forces of reactionary cruelty are on the march. So Sheinbaum, who has adopted López Obrador’s slogan “For the good of all, first the poor,” can seem like a shining exception to the reigning spirit of autocratic machismo.

“I feel very proud about her,” Marta Lamas, an anthropology professor and leading Mexican feminist who has known Sheinbaum for years, told me in Mexico City last week. “She is a light in this terrible situation that we are facing: Putin, Trump.”

Lamas said she’d feared a sexist backlash against Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, but six months into her term, there’s no sign of one. Sheinbaum was elected with almost 60 percent of the vote. Today her approval rating is above 80 percent. Last week, Bukele, who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” asked Grok, Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, the name of the planet’s most popular leader, evidently expecting it would be him. Grok responded, “Sheinbaum.”