Mexico is making history today as the country prepares to inaugurate the first woman to be elected president. Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and the former mayor of Mexico City, won a landslide victory in Mexico’s June elections. Sheinbaum is a member of the ruling Morena party and a close ally of outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term ends today. AMLO, as he’s widely known, leaves behind a complicated legacy as Mexico’s most popular president in decades whose approval rating never dropped below 60%. AMLO championed a “progressive reframing of anti-corruption politics that thinks of neoliberalism itself as a form of corruption,” says Edwin Ackerman, sociology professor at Syracuse University, who lays out how the president’s economic policies dramatically increased the economic power of the working classes in Mexico. However, Ackerman says AMLO also faced criticism for empowering the military, increasing the use of fossil fuels and pushing through highly contested judicial reform.
