President Claudia Sheinbaum has a 79% approval rating after her first year in office. Photo / Getty Images
Packed football stadiums across Mexico echoed chants of “Presidenta! Presidenta!” over the past month as President Claudia Sheinbaum traversed the country to report back to voters on her first 12 months in office.
At each stop on her weekend tours, Mexico’s first female President was assailed by supporters jostling to embrace her and ask for selfies.
With an approval rating of 79% in late August, up from around 70% after she took office, Sheinbaum has not just survived a year of diplomatic wrangling with United States President Donald Trump and fighting cartel violence, she is thriving on it.
Outside Mexico’s presidential palace, Pedro Partida, a retired caretaker, credited the 63-year-old with “restoring self-esteem” to women in a society characterised by stubbornly high levels of machismo.
“The phrase ‘you look prettier when you’re quiet’ no longer has a place in Mexico!” Sheinbaum declared with her trademark calm firmness in a video posted on social media.
“Girls come up to me and say, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up, I don’t want to be a princess anymore; I want to be president,’” she said in a separate campaign-style ad.
Born to a renowned chemist father and a biologist mother, Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist, is known for her diligence and keeping a cool head in times of crisis.
She “has a scientific approach ... based on data and facts, and she requests her team to present results within specific timeframes”, a European diplomat told AFP.
Sheinbaum herself claims to have learned discipline from an early age, as a ballet dancer, but her first year in power has, above all, been characterised by caution faced with the volatile Trump.
Her skills in dodging his ire and convincing him to postpone 30% tariffs on Mexican imports have won her global admiration.
But at home, Sheinbaum’s restraint has drawn critique, particularly on Gaza, a cause dear to supporters of her left-wing Morena Party.
“She has struggled a lot to use the word ‘genocide,’” Partida criticised.
In a sign of her discretion on the global stage, Sheinbaum ducked out of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, and she is also not planning to attend a G20 summit in South Africa in November, one of her aides told AFP.
“Domestic policy is clearly the only field that matters to her,” political analyst Carlo Bravo told AFP.
At home, she has her hands full in trying to extricate Mexico from a seemingly endless cycle of brutal narco violence.
While heralding a fall in murders over the past year, the number of people who have disappeared in Mexico has increased under her watch.
Between October and August, 13,547 people went missing, according to the National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons, many of them victims of cartel violence and forced recruitment.
In the same period of 2023/2024, the number of disappeared totalled 13,106.
Bravo blamed the “hugs, not bullets” approach to the cartels of Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
She has distanced herself from the approach, which critics say emboldened drug traffickers.
Since Sheinbaum took over, Mexico has extradited 55 senior cartel leaders and other fugitives to the US to face justice, and the police have made record hauls of fentanyl, the opioid blamed for thousands of overdose deaths in the US.
During a visit to Mexico City in early September, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced satisfaction with Mexico’s efforts.
“There’s no other government that’s co-operating as much with us in the fight against crime as the Government of Mexico and President Sheinbaum’s Administration,” he praised.
Mexico is not out of Trump’s sights yet, however.
Both Mexico and Canada are limbering up to do battle with Washington during next year’s review of their three-way free trade deal, which Trump claims puts US industry at a disadvantage.
With the US taking nearly 83% of Mexico’s exports, the deal is crucial for the Mexican economy.
-Agence France-Presse