No. 25: Claudia Sheinbaum: Mexico’s first woman president, governing on her own terms

In 2024, when Claudia Sheinbaum took office for a six-year term, she became not only Catholic Mexico’s first woman president but also its first Jewish president. According to a former schoolmate, becoming president had been her dream since childhood.

The 64-year-old was born in Mexico City to Mexican-born parents. In the 1920s, her father’s Ashkenazi Jewish parents emigrated from Lithuania; and in the 1940s, her mother’s Sephardi parents fled Bulgaria and the Holocaust, finding safety in Mexico. Even so, Sheinbaum defines herself as an atheist and has no official ties to her country’s Jewish community.

Before entering politics and becoming mayor of Mexico City in 2018, Sheinbaum was a climate scientist who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize by contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the prize jointly with Al Gore. As mayor of Mexico City until 2023, she pioneered green initiatives such as advancement in public transit, reforestation, and sustainable water management.

The chosen successor of former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, she leads the left-wing Morena Party, fighting economic inequality, opposing neo-liberal policies, maintaining a strict separation between private wealth and public office, and funding major welfare programs for students, seniors, and disabled individuals, while cutting unnecessary costs.

Sheinbaum moves around her country with minimum security, mirroring her predecessor’s accessible style. In November 2025, this led to her being groped in public, an incident she used to advance her women’s rights agenda, which has included establishing Mexico’s first Ministry of Women and securing landmark constitutional gender equality reforms, such as guaranteeing equal pay for equal work and parity across government cabinets.

Domestically, Sheinbaum has taken a stance against drug cartels. A major milestone was the February 2026 killing, during a security operation, of Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Concerning relations with the United States, she operates under what she terms a doctrine of “coordination, not subordination.” Due to Mexico’s heavy economic reliance on trade, she has negotiated complex migration, border, and tariff issues with US President Donald Trump.

Sheinbaum caused a diplomatic incident with Spain

Sheinbaum initially caused a diplomatic incident with Spain by refusing to invite King Felipe VI to her inauguration because the Spanish Crown had not apologized for its 16th-century conquest of Mexico (a demand made in a 2017 letter by López Obrador).

Yet 18 months into her term, she flew to Barcelona to attend the fourth In Defense of Democracy summit and the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization. This marked the first visit by a Mexican leader to Spain in eight years, since the Morena party had come to power. She pacified diplomatic tensions, resulting in a historic reconciliation visit by King Felipe VI to Mexico City on June 25 this year.

While Mexico maintains diplomatic relations with Israel, on March 19, 2025, Sheinbaum officially accepted the credentials of Nadya Rasheed as the first fully recognized Palestinian ambassador to Mexico. Then, on September 22, 2025, the Mexican president formally accused Israel of “genocide” during a press conference timed to coincide with the UN General Assembly in New York City.

No. 24: Gali Baharav-Miara, Isaac Amit, and Noam Sohlberg >>