In a few days, Mexico will wake up under an unprecedented political sky: it will be governed by a woman. It won’t be the only change. On October 2, one of the figures who has marked politics in recent decades will leave the stage. After four months of goodbyes and a “goodbye tour,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 70, is going to pass the baton to his successor. The first president of Mexico, eight years younger than her predecessor, comes to command a country besieged by violence, attentive to a possible economic slowdown, which has to carry out one of the most complex and controversial judicial reforms in decades, with a health system in its bones, unfinished works and under the long shadow of the founder of Morena. But there are no more postponements, Claudia Sheinbaum’s time has come.
The new president comes to power with an overwhelming result behind her. Elected by nearly 35.5 million Mexicans, almost 60% of the voters, she is the president with the most votes in Mexican history. The challenge now is huge. López Obrador leaves office with 80% approval, with some great social achievements and with many other urgent challenges. These pending issues in security, economy and justice are what will mark the first months of the new Government.
In the last six years, Mexico has not managed to shake off the alarming figures of violence. The country registers more than 30,000 murders a year. Once safe states have become a powder keg, as fighting between cartels and their factions terrorizes entire cities. Sheinbaum has chosen his former police chief in Mexico City, Omar García Harfuch, to head the Public Security Secretariat. With a strategy focused on strengthening the State’s investigation and intelligence capacity, García Harfuch will now have two imminent red spots: Chiapas and Sinaloa.
The struggle between criminal groups over trafficking on the southern border has left a trail of hundreds of murders and more than 10,000 displaced people in Chiapas. After months and despite the deployment of the military, the State continues to be occupied territory. In the north, the arrest of Ismael MayZambada and Joaquín Guzmán López, son of El Chapo, in July in the United States, has unleashed a pitched battle for control of the Sinaloa Cartel. The war between the Chapitos and the Mayiza has forced the suspension of classes and national holidays in part of the entity, where there are already more than 100 dead and another hundred missing.
A monster called Pemex
Mexico, the second largest economy in Latin America, has been showing signs of economic slowdown for months. The IMF has reduced its growth outlook to 2.2% and production and consumption have fallen. Furthermore, in the last year the fiscal deficit has doubled, which now stands at 6% of GDP. The public imbalance is one trillion pesos (about 45.5 million euros), the highest figure recorded in the Mexican Treasury. This record hole narrows the room for maneuver of Claudia Sheinbaum, who will have to juggle from the first day of her administration, to tighten the portfolio that López Obrador released during the last part of his Government. The president, who has entrusted the Ministry of Economy to former Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and has kept Rogelio Ramírez de la O in the Treasury, will not have so many options left: issue more debt or increase taxes, which seems unlikely in the eyes of the public. experts, or cut the budget.
The new Administration will also have to deal with the elephant in the room: Pemex. The parastatal Petróleos Mexicanos owes 99,391 million dollars (almost 89,000 million euros), it is the most indebted oil company in the world, and its production continues to decline, just above 1.7 million barrels per day. The next director, academic Víctor Rodríguez Padilla, will assume the reins of a suffocated company despite the million-dollar injections and tax forgiveness that the López Obrador Government ordered in its favor. Furthermore, in a global context of transition to other cleaner energies, Pemex is, according to the United States Institute for Climate Responsibility, the ninth most polluting oil company in the world.
The new judicial reform, highly criticized by economists and investors, is not going to help Mexican finances. Approved in extremis Before López Obrador left office, the controversial initiative required more than 1,600 positions to be elected by popular vote, including judges, magistrates and ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN). The organization of these massive elections—in Mexico City alone, citizens will have to decide about 350 positions, which means analyzing more than 2,000 candidacies—will mark the beginning of the Sheinbaum Administration. It is scheduled that in June 2025, half of these judges will be elected at the polls, which will be completed with a second phase in 2027. In addition, López Obrador has left a package of major reforms pending approval for the next six-year term, such as the disappearance of autonomous bodies or the increase in crimes of informal preventive detention.
The shadow of the leader
A country in which 10 women are killed every day, more than 3,600 a year, has elected its first female president in history. Sheinbaum comes to power with the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), the party founded by López Obrador. The scientist, who was head of Government of Mexico City between 2018 and 2023, will now have to adjust the pieces to succeed the figure of her predecessor, who enjoys immense popularity and also power within her movement. Although López Obrador has announced that he is retiring from the public spotlight after starring in them for 30 years and is going to live at his ranch in Tabasco, in the south of Mexico, his son Andrés López Beltrán remains, for example, as Secretary of Organization of the game.
Praised and criticized in equal measure, the president changed the rules of political communication when he announced in 2018 that he would appear before the press every day. These conferences, called Mañaneras, last between two and three hours, which López Obrador uses to set agenda items, praise his officials or criticize his adversaries. Sheinbaum, with a communication profile very different from that of the president, has announced that he is going to maintain them, although the format has not yet been revealed. The mystery will not go beyond October 2, when the starting gun is given. It’s time for the president to give her shape to the space.
