Claudia Sheinbaum

Biography

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born in Mexico City on 24 June 1962 into a secular Jewish family; her parents were a chemist and a biologist active in left-wing circles. She studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), took a master's degree and then a doctorate in energy engineering in 1995, doing her thesis research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on energy use in Mexico. She joined UNAM's Institute of Engineering in 1995 and went on to write more than a hundred papers on energy and the environment, contributing to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution from 1989, she served from 2000 to 2006 as environment secretary of the Federal District under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, where she oversaw the Metrobús rapid-transit system and the second deck of the Periférico ring road. In 2014 she followed López Obrador into his new party, Morena, and the next year she was elected mayor of the Tlalpan borough.

She was Head of Government of Mexico City from December 2018 to June 2023, a period that included the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of a Metro overpass. She resigned to seek the presidency, won Morena's nomination and defeated Xóchitl Gálvez by a wide margin in June 2024, becoming Mexico's first woman president on 1 October 2024. With a supermajority in Congress she has pushed through constitutional changes that write social programmes into the constitution and strengthen state control of the energy sector.