Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, born in Mexico City on 24 June 1962, is Mexico’s 66th president and the first woman—and first person of Jewish heritage—to hold the office. She took the oath on 1 October 2024 after winning a landslide in June of that year, carrying nearly 60 percent of the vote and a record number of ballots. Almost two years into her six-year term, she remains the central figure of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) project known as the Fourth Transformation, blending continuity with her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador and a more data-driven, less theatrical style of her own.
Sheinbaum grew up in a secular Jewish family of scientists and left-wing activists. Her father, Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was a chemical engineer whose Ashkenazi parents had emigrated from Lithuania in the 1920s. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, is a biologist and UNAM professor emeritus whose Sephardic family fled Bulgaria in the early 1940s. Both parents were involved in the 1968 student movement that ended in the Tlatelolco massacre. Politics and science were household subjects. Sheinbaum studied ballet for years before choosing physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1989 with a thesis on the thermodynamics of rural wood-burning stoves, then a master’s and a doctorate in energy engineering. Doctoral research took her to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In 1995 she became the first woman to receive a UNAM doctorate in that field and joined the university’s Institute of Engineering faculty. She later contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, sharing in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore. She has published more than 100 specialized papers and two books on energy, environment, and sustainable development.
Politics was never far away. As a student she joined movements against the privatization of public education. She married fellow activist Carlos Ímaz Gispert in 1987; they had a daughter, Mariana, and raised Ímaz’s son Rodrigo. The marriage ended in 2016. In 2023 she married physicist Jesús María Tarriba, a university classmate. She entered formal government in 2000 when López Obrador, then head of Mexico City’s government, appointed her environment secretary. In that post she oversaw the first Metrobús line and the second deck of the Periférico beltway. After a return to academia and work as López Obrador’s campaign spokeswoman in 2006 and 2012, she won election as head of the Tlalpan borough in 2015 and, in 2018, became the first woman elected head of government of Mexico City.
Her five years running one of the world’s largest cities mixed measurable results with controversy. Official figures showed large drops in homicides and high-impact crime. She expanded public transport with Cablebús lines and more Metrobús corridors, promoted electric buses and solar projects, and managed COVID-19 with more testing and hospital capacity than the federal government initially favored. Critics pointed to the May 2021 collapse of an elevated section of Metro Line 12, which killed 26 people; high rates of impunity even as homicides fell; a rise in disappearances; and environmental trade-offs on infrastructure. The record was strong enough, and her loyalty to Morena clear enough, that she became the coalition’s presidential candidate. She resigned the city job in 2023 and won the June 2024 election by a historic margin, with Morena and allies securing legislative supermajorities.
As president she has framed her government as “the second floor” of the Fourth Transformation: cash transfers and pensions expanded rather than cut, the minimum wage raised further (now more than 150 percent higher in real terms than in 2018), and social programs written into the constitution. By late 2026 the government claimed welfare programs would reach more than 42 million beneficiaries, unemployment near 2.5–2.7 percent, record foreign direct investment, and a 51 percent drop in the daily average of intentional homicides compared with the last month of the previous administration. Congress approved a gradual reduction of the workweek toward 40 hours by 2030. New hospitals and clinics have opened. Sheinbaum has also pursued passenger-rail projects linking the capital to other cities and industrial parks under “Plan México.”
On security she has been less faithful to López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” slogan. She brought Mexico City security chief Omar García Harfuch to the federal cabinet and emphasized intelligence, raids, laboratory dismantling, and extraditions. Homicide statistics improved; disappearances and questions about how deaths are classified did not disappear. Relations with the United States under a second Trump administration have required constant management: tariff threats, fentanyl, migration, and Chinese goods routed through Mexico. Sheinbaum has combined public defense of sovereignty with pragmatic talks and some alignment on trade and enforcement. Energy policy remains a tension. A climate scientist by training, she has promised a higher share of renewables while also protecting Pemex and state control of electricity, a core Morena commitment.
Style distinguishes her from her mentor. She holds daily morning conferences, travels the country several days a week, and presents herself as a scientist who believes in measurement. She is less confrontational toward opponents and the press than López Obrador was, though she still accuses critics of trying to invent a rupture with him. In May 2026 she told supporters, “We are the same, we are the same project.” Approval ratings have stayed high by international standards—often in the mid-to-high 60s in Mexican pollsters’ surveys—though they have cooled from the extraordinary peaks of her first year. A 2026 Pew survey found 64 percent of Mexicans viewed her favorably, down from 83 percent a year earlier. Pocketbook worries and inherited corruption cases inside Morena have chipped at the numbers without collapsing them. In 2025 Forbes ranked her the fifth most powerful woman in the world.
Sheinbaum’s significance is both symbolic and structural. A Jewish woman leading a predominantly Catholic country of 130 million, a physicist heading a political movement built by a folksy nationalist, she embodies a generational and professional shift inside Mexican left populism. Whether her government is remembered as consolidation of the Fourth Transformation or as the start of something more distinct will depend on the rest of the sexenio: whether homicide reductions hold, whether the welfare state remains fiscally sustainable, whether energy and water shortages are managed, and whether Morena’s supermajority produces durable institutions or only durable power. For now she governs as both heir and administrator—la Doctora at the National Palace, insisting that science, social spending, and political loyalty can occupy the same office.