Mexico elects a woman scientist and leftist as president

                   Mexico elects a woman scientist and leftist as president 

 

 Mexico has elected a woman, Claudia Sheinbaum, as the new President, in a new milestone for gender parity in the country.

Her main opponent Xochitl Galvez was also another woman candidate of the center right coalition.

Gender parity

The election of the first female president is a climax of the gender  parity  movement in Mexican politics in the last two decades.

In 2003, Mexico started with introduction of a  30 percent quota for women political party nominees. In 2014, the Congress passed a law for gender parity in federal and state legislative elections. In 2019, the Congress enacted another law which made gender parity in all the three sectors of power: Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. Half of Mexico’s legislature since 2021 is female. The presidents of both the chambers of legislature are women. The cabinet has 9 women in a total of 18 ministers. A woman is chief justice of the Supreme Court. Sheinbaum has promised to advance the feminist agenda further.

 

Since January 2020, Mexico has a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) too. It focuses on the creation of gender parity in its foreign and national policy mechanisms. Mexico has become the largest nation to achieve gender parity and the first country from the global south to have a FFP.

 

Scientist

 

The president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum is a scientist and both her parents and her brother are also scientists. She has a Ph.D in energy engineering from California. She was part of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which won the Nobel Peace Prize for the work on climate change. 

 

Leftist

 

She is a member of the leftist Morena party of the outgoing president Lopez Obrador. He was the first leftist to be elected as president of Mexico in 2018. With his pro-poor policies, he has lifted millions of Mexicans out of poverty, increased wages and invested in infrastructure projects. With his very high popularity ratings he could have easily got reelected. But the Mexican constitution allows only a single term of six years for presidents. So he had chosen Sheinbaum as his successor and had groomed her since 2000 when he was elected as Mayor of Mexico city. He was looking for an expert to deal with the high level of pollution and found her profile as a climate scientist as the perfect fit. He made her as the environment secretary. Since then she has been a loyal follower and colleague of Obrador, despite his eccentricities. She was elected as Mayor of Mexico city in 2018 and served till June 2023. Before that, she was Mayor of a part of Mexico city called as Tlalpan from 2015 to 2017.

 

Sheinbaum is a data-driven technocrat and goal-oriented pragmatic and sober political leader. She does not have a personal charisma or a strong political base of her own. The credit for her successful political career goes to Obrador. He was comfortable with her low profile without any ambition so far to outshine him. On the other hand, she also realized that she had a winning path by following Obrador and did not mind being known as his protégé.  Obrador is a populist who communicates directly with people through his daily week day press conferences at 7 in the mornings (mañanera) and through social media. He used these to trumpet his achievements, attack his opponents and share his feelings in general. He has set a new standard as a corruption-free president in Mexico. He lives an austere life foregoing the presidential aircraft. He travels in economy class in the regular flights. He has reduced the presidential salary by 60% and also many of the perks.

 

Obrador’s Morena party has swept the polls for the Congress as well as other positions for which simultaneous elections were held on Sunday.  The coalition of Morena party has got very close to clinching a supermajority in Congress, obtaining two-thirds of the seats in the lower house and nearly two-thirds in the senate.  Even in gubernatorial races that were expected to be competitive, Morena and its allies have emerged victorious with clear margins. Obrador is likely to use this majority to try constitutional changes to advance his progressive agenda, although some of them are controversial. 

 

As a committed leftist and disciple of Obrador, Sheinbaum has criticized the neoliberal economic policies of Washington Consensus followed by the past presidents of Mexico, arguing that they had contributed to inequality in the country. She has promised to expand welfare and intends to continue the programs started by Obrador.

 

Foreign policy

 

While Obrador would continue to influence Sheinbaum in some domestic policies, she will get a free hand in foreign policy for which Obrador has complete disdain. He has ignored foreign policy and has zero ambition to raise his or Mexico’s profile in the region or globally. He said “the best foreign policy is a good domestic one” He considers foreign travel as a waste and avoids summit meetings. His travels have been limited only to a few trips to US and Latin America.

 

But Obrador  was proactive in extending support to leftist presidents in trouble and attacking the right wing presidents in Latin America. He had given asylum to leftist presidents overthrown in coups and criticized right wing regimes bluntly and publicly. These have lead to diplomatic disruptions in some cases. He has downplayed the non-democratic leftist regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. At the same time, he has not sought to be a regional leader of the left, unlike Chavez and Lula. 

 

Sheinbaum will be more sober and pragmatic in foreign policy and avoid the anti-right and pro-left rhetoric of her predecessor.

 

Relations with the US 

 

López Obrador pledged at the beginning of his administration in 2018 that there would be no tension with the U.S. and he has largely kept that promise by working quietly with the US on issues of serious concern such as illegal migration. Obrador managed both President Trump and Biden without major controversies. In fact, he had shown support at times to Trump despite the latter’s ugly anti-Mexican attacks. But he refused to give in to the American pressure to give priority to deal with drug cartels and militarize the issue. He took the stand that “ hugs not bullets” is needed in Mexico to deal with the fundamental socioeconomic issues. 

 

Obrador has called for the removal of the US sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2022, he had refused to attend the Summit of Americas in Los Angeles because those three countries were not invited. 

 

Sheinbaum has said Mexico would have “good relations” with either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden as president, and that Mexico would continue to work to contain flows of illegal migrants.

 

Mexico is the largest trading partner and the #1 source of imports of US. Mexico has overtaken China as the largest exporter to US in 2023, thanks to the USMCA Free Trade Agreement with the US and Canada. As part of the new trend of friend-shoring, many American firms and global MNCs are shifting manufacturing to Mexico from China. 

 

Sheinbaum is the first Mexican president of Jewish heritage. In a newspaper Op-ed in 2009, she wrote, “No reason justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians” and called for Palestinian liberation and reflected on her own family’s history of escaping Nazi persecution. 

 

President Obrador has has refused to join the US sanctions on Russia and has condemned supply of arms by the west to Ukraine.

 

India- Mexico

 

Mexico is the second largest destination for India’s exports to Latin America. The 2023-24 exports of India to Mexico (5324 m) are more than the exports to Thailand (5038 m), Russia (4261 m), Canada (3845 m), Sri Lanka (4117 m) and Egypt (3520 m).

 

Mexico is the largest destination for India’s global exports of motor cycles with 281 million dollars. Car exports to Mexico are 874 m in 2023-24.

 

India  can increase its exports significantly if it signs a FTA with Mexico which has FTA with 50 countries. Mexico’s total imports were over 600 billion dollars in 2023.

 

India’s imports from Mexico were 3.1 billion dollars. Crude oil accounted for 1.8 billion dollars, followed by electrical equipment worth 442 m.

 

A number of Indian IT, pharma and autoparts companies have invested in Mexico. Samvardhana Motherson Group from Noida has 19 plants in Mexico which supply auto parts to OEMs. JK Tyres has three tyre plants. 

 

Mexican company Grupo Bimbo is the largest bread maker in India. It had acquired the famous Modern Bread company of India in 2021. Cinepolis of Mexico is the third largest owner of multiplexes in India with over 440 screens. Kidzania, a Mexican edutainment chain has theme parks in Mumbai and Delhi in a joint venture with Shah Rukh Khan, the actor. There are also some Mexican autoparts makers operating in India.

 

The last Mexican president to take interest in India was Felipe Calderon (2006-12) who visited India in 2007 and pitched for India’s investment. President Obrador had no interest in India unlike the other leftist presidents of Latin America who have sought economic and development partnership. The new president Sheinbaum might show interest. Muktesh Pardesi, Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and former ambassador to Mexico recalls his meeting with Sheinbaum in 2018 when she was mayor of Mexico city. She had shown interest in cooperation with India in climate change mitigation, electric mobility and culture.

 

Mexican lessons for US

 

The American politicians, the Hollywood and the media have always given a negative narrative of Mexico through their obsession with the issues of drug trafficking and illegal immigration. They have been lecturing the Mexicans about democracy.  Now it is time for the Gringos to learn from the democratic maturity and best practices of Mexicans. Firstly, the two Mexican presidential candidates, who lost, had conceded and congratulated the winner even on the basis of the preliminary results before the final counting. The Congressional building of Mexico is safe and free from any attacks as it happened in Washington DC. Secondly the two leading candidates are highly qualified, cultured and respected: the winner is a scientist and the runner is techpreneur. Mexico would have done well even if the runner was elected. This is in contrast to Trump who has been indicted on criminal cases and who has crossed the lines of decency in public discourse. Thirdly. The Mexican women have been empowered politically, while the American women have to suffer with Trump who makes obscene remarks about women and brags about grabbing them by their genitals. Fourthly, the Mexican campaign discourse was free from the preposterous lies and fake news in the US.

 

The American charges of  Mexican drug trafficking and illegal immigration need to be seen in a non-American neutral perspective. 

 

Drug is a consumer-driven and demand-driven big billion dollar business in USA. Eighty percent of each dollar involved in the drug business stays in US itself. Despite the long War on Drugs, the American drug consumption has not come down.  American pharmaceutical companies such  as Purdue Pharma are equally responsible for opioid addiction and deaths in US. These companies have got away after paying fines. 

 

While the Americans demand end to illegal trafficking of drugs from Mexico, they do nothing to stop the illegal trafficking of American guns into Mexico which has a strong gun control regime. In the whole of Mexico, there is only one gun shop. It is located in Mexico city and controlled by the military. So almost all the guns used in the massacres and crime in Mexico are American guns. There are several thousands of American gun shops in the border with Mexico making illegal sales and facilitating open trafficking. Every year, more Mexicans are killed by American guns than the number of American deaths caused by Mexican drugs.

 

Mexican illegal emigration needs to be seen in the light of this popular Mexican story. A Mexican was caught by the US border patrol agent who said, “ Mister, you have crossed the border into US.”. The Mexican responded, “ Senor, I did not cross the border. The border has crossed me”. This is the truth. The Americans had grabbed (Trump style) 55 percent of Mexican territory in 1848. These include the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. So the Mexican immigration into US is as they say “ the chickens are coming home to roost”.