President of Mexico and a climate scientist by training. She won a landslide victory in June 2024 and took office in October of that year. A protégée of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, she has enjoyed sky-high approval ratings. She is the first Mexican leader in years to push violent crime in the right direction. Her government claims murders have fallen by 32% in her first year; analysis by The Economist puts the decline at 14%. A broader measure including manslaughter, femicide and roughly two-thirds of disappearances shows a 6% decline. The amount of fentanyl seized at the United States border has fallen sharply. She has done everything possible to keep alive the idea of a more integrated North America, conceding to Trump on migration and security. She has won praise for deftly handling Donald Trump's trade belligerence. On September 18th 2025 she met Mark Carney, Canada's prime minister, on his first official trip to Mexico; the pair promised to "strengthen" the USMCA.
She has promised to improve health care for Mexico's poorest by hiring more doctors for the patchy network of government-run clinics and by providing medication free.
Mexico's economy grew by just 0.8% in 2025, Sheinbaum's first full year in power—the worst growth rate since the pandemic and the slowest of any large Latin American economy. Investment fell by 6.6%; public investment plunged by 28%, the steepest drop in over three decades. Formal employment contracted. GDP per person slipped back to its 2017 level. Rather than pursue structural tax reform, her government has chased large firms for unpaid tax bills, calculated retroactively in ways some firms call arbitrary. Successive Morena constitutional reforms, the reshaping of the judiciary and greater state control over energy and water have generated uncertainty for formal employers.
On August 5th 2025 Sheinbaum unveiled a reform plan for Pemex, the state oil company. The plan uses a Luxembourg-based special-purpose vehicle to raise $12bn in dollar bonds and creates a 250bn-peso ($13bn) investment fund to pay suppliers and bankroll projects. The goal is for Pemex to be financially self-sufficient from 2027 and its debt to fall to $77bn by 2030. She has pledged to build gas-storage capacity, upgrade pipelines and raise domestic gas output by about 25% by 2030. She has also hinted at allowing fracking, though Pemex's boss quickly denied this. She is more welcoming to public-private partnerships than her mentor but still thinks state firms should predominate. In 2026 Morena backtracked on its constitutional entrenchment of the state's energy monopoly, introducing a new model that allows private firms to take minority stakes in state-run energy projects.
Sheinbaum has abandoned López Obrador's "hugs not bullets" security policy, which assumed poverty was the root cause of crime. She has instead pushed intelligence gathering and co-ordination between different branches of Mexico's security apparatus. Her security secretary, Omar García Harfuch, previously served as Mexico City's security chief under her mayorship, during which the city's murder rate fell by about 40%. She has given him broad new powers over co-ordination and intelligence, and his allies run key institutions including the financial-intelligence unit. His new federal police corps has recruited only 1,500 officers so far; the government has urged states to employ 25% more police officers by 2029. She has also started to reverse López Obrador's militarisation of the police, which critics say led to brutality and shoddier detective work.
In September 2025 Mexico imposed tariffs of 20–50% on 1,463 products from countries with which it has no free-trade deal, including a 50% tariff on Chinese cars, which in 2024 accounted for 20% of new cars sold in Mexico, up from under 1% in 2017. Mexico claims these tariffs protect local industries, but they are also a reaction to Trump's concerns about China. Mexico has also drawn up a screening mechanism for foreign direct investment and passed it to American officials to review.
After Nicolás Maduro's capture in January 2026, Sheinbaum condemned "unilateral action and invasion" but otherwise remained close to Trump. She has ramped up action against drug gangs, tightened border enforcement, extradited kingpins and slapped tariffs on China—granting just about Trump's every wish. The cost of unilaterally striking Mexico, America's largest trading partner, would be much higher than that of attacking Colombia. Mexico is already allowing American surveillance drones to fly over its territory. Trump may push Sheinbaum to go after Mexican politicians suspected of colluding with drug traffickers, especially within Morena; Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a rare foray back into public life to condemn the Maduro operation, underscoring the delicacy of managing the party's diehard leftist wing.
On February 22nd 2026 Mexican special forces killed Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, the boss of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, in a raid in Jalisco. The operation was a triumph for Sheinbaum and gave her kudos with Donald Trump, who had repeatedly asked her to do more to dismantle gangs. The decision to go after El Mencho was almost certainly taken, at least in part, to please Mr Trump. But it risks a return to the discredited "kingpin strategy" of removing gang bosses, which tends to cause organisations to splinter and murders to spike—something Sheinbaum has herself repeatedly criticised.
In April 2025 she refused Donald Trump's offer to send American troops into Mexico to fight the cartels. In response Trump said: "She is so afraid of the cartels that she can't even think straight." By October 2025, however, she was broadly co-operating with America's war on drugs: Mexico has dispatched 55 alleged kingpins to America, is seizing more fentanyl on its side of the border, and has permitted American surveillance drones to operate over Mexican territory. Joint intelligence-gathering is helping map financial and logistics networks.
On April 29th 2026 the US Department of Justice published an indictment charging ten Morena-linked officials, three of them party politicians, with conspiring with the Sinaloa Cartel to traffic drugs into America. Among them was Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of Sinaloa, who has since stepped down. Reports had long suggested the cartel helped him win his office in 2021. Sheinbaum's response, balancing relations with the United States against the risk of fracturing her party, will define her presidency.
Sheinbaum is enacting López Obrador's sweeping judicial reform, which replaces every judge in the country through popular elections. She pushed through the implementing legislation in October 2024 and has shown no inclination to change course. Critics say she may be remembered as the leader who dismembered the rule of law in Mexico.
The first round of judicial elections on June 1st 2025 drew just 13% turnout, yet Sheinbaum hailed the vote as "a complete success" and claimed it made Mexico "the world's most democratic country". All nine Supreme Court seats were won by Morena-linked candidates. She blamed the opposition for the low turnout. With Morena now controlling the executive, a congressional supermajority and the judiciary, she faces none of the institutional constraints that delayed or overturned several of López Obrador's signature policies.
Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3 -- not even for large values of 2.