by EDWIN F. ACKERMAN
Claudia Sheinbaum took the helm a year ago riding a high wave. With 60 per cent of the vote and a supermajority for her party MORENA in both chambers, the Mexican President entered office in October 2024 with an approval rating of around 70 per cent – a figure she has not only sustained but during some months surpassed, reaching the 80s, making her among the most popular leaders in the world. With a clear mandate, Sheinbaum has pushed through a slew of constitutional reforms, expanded welfare programmes and successfully navigated a fraught relationship with the Trump administration. Sheinbaum – whose tenure as mayor of Mexico City (2018-2023) saw a 40 per cent drop in the murder rate – has also made inroads into the country’s notorious problem with organised crime: although regional violence remains high and the recent murder of Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan, has dampened any triumphalism, Sheinbaum’s government can boast a 37 per cent reduction in homicides.
The political cycle which began with the 2018 election of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been distinguished by significant democratic legitimacy. According to the recently released OECD Trust Survey 54 per cent of Mexicans have a high or moderately high trust in the federal government, well above the average of 39 per cent. A Gallup poll from last year indicated that ‘confidence in national government’ had jumped from 29 per cent to 61 per cent since MORENA took power, and that ‘confidence in the honesty of Mexico’s elections’ had risen by 25 points. The Pew Research Center has likewise shown that Mexicans’ ‘satisfaction with their democracy’ has soared by a remarkable 36 points between 2017 and 2019. This legitimacy is premised on the gains of MORENA’s post-neoliberal social pact – AMLO’s ‘Fourth Transformation’, a national renewal conceived in a lineage of historic upheavals, beginning with the struggle for independence in the 19th century. During López Obrador’s term real wages went up nearly 30 per cent and over 13 million were lifted out of poverty.
Yet building the transformation’s ‘second storey’, as Sheinbaum has described her mission, has revealed crucial tensions besetting the populist left-wing project: expanding welfare with a dilapidated state apparatus; pursuing neo-developmentalist strategies amid escalating ecological crisis; passing progressive taxation reform in a context of stagnant economic growth; freeing Mexico’s economy from its subordinate status in transnational circuits of capital without abandoning global markets tout court. These interlocking issues illuminate not only the specificities of the Mexican case but the structural limits and strategic dilemmas facing progressive forces worldwide.
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