Celebrations were held all throughout Mexico last weekend as Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president in a landslide victory. Winning 58 to 60 per cent of the popular vote, the left-wing continuity candidate swept the floor with her main rival, Xóchitl Gálvez, who led the conservative alliance.
Sheinbaum, 61, will be the first female president in Mexico’s 200 years of independence. She will also be the first Jewish head of state, something that she kept largely under wraps throughout the campaign.
Nogales is a border city in the north of the Mexican state of Sonora, just south of the US border. Its roughly 250,000 inhabitants largely make a living from tourism, manufacturing, and exports to the US. In a cafe, Mario, 71, and Teofilo, 63, two old friends, are having lunch. Mario voted for Sheinbaum, he tells me, largely because of her links to the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “Claudia is going to continue what López Obrador started,” he says. “He’s the best president we’ve had in recent times, in every single way.” This isn’t an unpopular opinion. López Obrador’s approval rating has sat comfortably above 60 per cent since he was elected in 2018. Even Teofilo, who voted for Gálvez, is a fan of the current president. “He didn’t fail us, not on anything,” he says. And in what he couldn’t quite manage to follow through on? “Well, six years is very few to achieve everything you wanted to”.
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO - JUNE 03: Presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum of ''Sigamos Haciendo Historia'' waves at supporters after the first results released by the election authorities show that she leads the polls by wide margin after the presidential election at Hilton Hotel on June 03, 2024 in Mexico City, Mexico. According to the Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE) over 100 million people were allowed to vote on the 2024 Presidential Election in Mexico. Claudia Sheinbaum of 'Sigamos Haciendo Historia' coalition will become the first woman president of Mexico. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images)Getty Images
Neither Mario nor Teofilo seem interested in Sheinbaum’s ethnicity – or her gender. Teofilo’s issue, as an accountant, is her left-wing economic policy. “The most important thing is that she’s a president for the people,” Mario says. Throughout Nogales, this sentiment is shared. Carlos, 47, who works in a clothes shop round the corner, tells me her faith isn’t his priority. “The most important thing is that she’s for the country, for Mexico, and she’s Mexican”. Porfirio, 50, who runs a gift shop nearby, didn’t even know she was Jewish.
This isn’t that surprising. Sheinbaum has kept her faith out of the limelight throughout her campaign. The president-elect was born to two Jewish parents – both of whose families fled Europe. Her father’s parents left Lithuania in the early 20th century and her mother’s parents fled Bulgaria before the Holocaust. Sheinbaum, however, has preferred to emphasise her secular upbringing. A climate scientist, she is referred to as La Doctora Claudia (Doctor Claudia).
Before her campaign began, Sheinbaum was more open about her Jewish roots. Speaking at a Jewish event in Mexico City, she told the crowd: “I grew up without religion, that’s how my parents raised me. But obviously the culture, that’s in your blood.” She has also said she observed Yom Kippur with her grandparents as a child, but in a way “more cultural than religious”.
Mexico’s Jewish community is small, numbering just less than 60,000, so I am surprised when I notice that Clara, a herbalist in Nogales who did not vote last weekend, is wearing a Magen David. She laughs. “I’m not Jewish,” she says, “I just like the Star of David, for me it represents the union of the earth and heaven.”
While rates of antisemitism remain relatively low in Mexico, Sheinbaum’s faith has still made her a target. The former president, Vincente Fox, called Sheinbaum “Jewish and foreign at the same time”, referencing a conspiracy theory that the president-elect is not Mexican but was born in Bulgaria. Since her historic win, Sheinbaum has also been victim of antisemitic attacks on social media.
Demonstrators clash with the police during a pro-Palestinian rally called "Urgent action for Rafah", held in front of the Israeli embassy in Mexico City on May 28, 2024. (Photo by Pedro PARDO / AFP) (Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
Her win comes just a week after the Israeli embassy in Mexico City was set on fire during a pro-Palestine protest. The war in Gaza has political weight in Mexico, with the government under Sheinbaum’s predecessor – and close ally – filing an intervention in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Shortly after the October 7 attacks, Sheinbaum issued a condemnation of Hamas and at the same time encouraged the recognition of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Sheinbaum has previously invoked her Jewish identity in advocating for Palestine. In a letter to La Jornada, a popular Mexican newspaper, in 2009, she wrote that “due to my Jewish origins, my love for Mexico, and the feeling that I’m a citizen of the world… I can only watch with horror the images of the bombing of Gaza by the Israeli state”.
In Nogales, it doesn’t seem to be foreign policy that most concerns voters. Outside the local school, Maria Luisa and her husband, Martin, are waiting to pick up their grandson. “We need someone who will work for Mexico,” Maria tells me. Her main worry is now that Claudia has such a majority, she’ll stop caring about the people she promised to serve.
Martin agrees. He voted for Claudia, while his wife did not vote, citing the long wait times at polling booths. “In 200 years, we haven’t had a woman in power. I don’t care about her faith; I just hope for the best for Mexico. We have a lot of hope.”
Nonetheless, for the Jewish population in Mexico, Sheinbaum’s win will be significant. As Ilhan Stavans, a Jewish-Mexican scholar, has said, “her sheer arrival” to the presidency will generate interest in the rich history of Jews in Latin America, who have lived in the region since the 16th century. The hope is that this interest will be a positive one, and not one which could endanger the small, but thriving, community.
