THE GUARDIAN: Claudia Sheinbaum started as an activist. Now she is Mexico’s president. Has she stayed true to her ideals?
The president’s dressmaker works at home, down a narrow road in a working-class neighbourhood on the southernmost edge of Mexico City. There is no sign, just the house number marked in chalk on a rusted metal door. In the brightly lit, pink-walled room at the back of her modest house, Olivia Trujillo sits at her sewing machine, piecing together the president’s signature suits and dresses. Trujillo sews everything here, accompanied only by her family, three dogs, and one green parrot. Once finished, an assistant spirits away the items by motorcycle straight to the National Palace, where the president lives. Claudia Sheinbaum’s clothing – tailored from modest fabrics produced in Mexico and featuring Indigenous motifs – is one of the many ways that her administration communicates its slogan: “For the good of all, first the poor.”
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President Claudia Sheinbaum is one of the most popular democratically elected leaders in the world. Her approval rating hovers about 70% or above, and she stands out against the wave of conservative and far-right leaders elected throughout the Americas in recent years. For many leftists around the world, she is an inspiration. Zohran Mamdani has signalled his admiration for Sheinbaum on many occasions, saying she “has shown what can be won when you’re willing to fight”. She has drawn praise for her management of the country’s most difficult and important relationship, that with its northern neighbour. Deftly running down the clock during tariff negotiations with Donald Trump last year was a demonstration of her signature attitude, which she calls cabeza fría, coolheadedness under pressure. It helps also that she is a climate scientist with a PhD in energy engineering.
Sheinbaum is still an academic at heart. Someone who works with her told me to look up the YouTube video of a presentation she gave in June 2025 trying to convince the US that fentanyl trafficking from Mexico was going down. “That’s what it is like to be in meetings with her,” he said. The presentation was all charts, detailed sourcing and minutiae. Sheinbaum is universally agreed to be a detail-obsessed micromanager. She goes to bed early and is up at 4am texting everyone from her senior advisers to lowly functionaries working in obscure departments. » | Rachel Nolan | Thursday, June 11, 2026
