Mexico’s History-Making Leader Charts Her Own Course—Delicately

Twelve days after Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo won the June election that would make her Mexico’s first female head of state, she hit the road with the spectacle-loving President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. AMLO, as the Mexican leader is called, had years ago been her first boss in public office, coaxing her out of academia and making her chief of the capital’s environmental office. The party he founded, Morena, had become the top political force in the country after it first appeared on a ballot in 2015. But before Sheinbaum’s Oct. 1 inauguration, he insisted they take a tour together of Mexico’s 31 states and its capital.

One skeptical columnist called it a “hijacking” of the president-elect’s agenda. People who criticized his leadership wondered when Sheinbaum would come out from under the president’s yoke. López Obrador had promised he’d retire to a lagoon-lined plot of land and have nothing to do with politics, but he didn’t take a back seat in the transition. He continued to give the daily hourslong press conference that he’d invented to speak to listeners across Mexico. (You could watch the mañanera on YouTube or on any major TV news channel.) The constitutional reforms he proposed, including a rewriting of the judicial system, remained front-page news throughout the summer and into the days before the transfer of power.