She was mayor of Mexico’s capital city until last year, when she stepped down to run for president. Yet Claudia Sheinbaum, the pollsters’ favourite to win Sunday’s election, remains something of an enigma. It is an impression that her tightly scripted election appearances have done little to dispel. Is she a scientifically trained technocrat, as her campaign staff suggest? Or an ideologue schooled in far left student movements, as detractors claim?
So who is Sheinbaum? Mexico’s likely next president allows herself a brief laugh when the Financial Times put the question to her in the back seat of her modest Chevrolet saloon as she is driven between campaign rallies.
“I’m part of all that,” she says. “I grew up with the social movements, I grew up as a scientist in my home and with my own career, so clearly I was formed by all those things . . . all my life I have fought for justice in Mexico.”