Sheinbaum’s Inaugural Radicalism

Mexico’s whirlwind political year hasn’t slowed since the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as the country’s next president. Her June election as Mexico’s first female president was notable in itself and was quickly followed by divisive, far-reaching judicial reforms. Now, as she prepares to don the banda presidencial, Mexico has kicked up a diplomatic row with Spain.

Sheinbaum is using today’s inauguration to bolster her left-wing credentials, refusing to invite Spanish King Felipe VI to her own coronation in Mexico City. She cited Felipe’s refusal to apologize to Mexico for alleged colonial crimes perpetrated against the Aztecs and other indigenous tribes a half-millennium ago. The row started with Sheinbaum’s mentor, President Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who demanded in 2019 that the King and the Vatican apologize for what he called “abuses” of “what we now call human rights.”

The Spanish monarch, to his credit, refused to engage with AMLO’s grievance politics and declined to apologize, perhaps recognizing that what we now consider human rights were undeniably enhanced after the barbaric Aztec empire was defeated. He also likely perceived that AMLO’s actions were inspired by his affection for half-baked 1970s social activism and his propensity to stir controversy for political gain. Untethered by the sometimes gross demands of popular democracy, Felipe simply ignored AMLO. 

Tensions between Mexico and her mother country seemed to cool in the subsequent years, but Sheinbaum’s recent actions have rekindled the dispute as an opening salvo of her presidency. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who received an invitation separate from his monarch, was quick to point out the obvious political motivations of the act and was generally indignant in his response. Speaking from the United Nations, Sánchez retaliated by withholding diplomatic representation at the inauguration.

“Spain and Mexico are brotherly peoples. We cannot, therefore, accept being excluded like this,” he said. “That is why we have made it known to the Mexican government that there will be no diplomatic representative from the Spanish government as a sign of protest.”

As the former general secretary of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Sánchez’s decision to issue a diplomatic rebuke is rather notable. Sánchez has spent years in Spain drumming up historical grievances of his own, particularly surrounding the Franco regime of the last century. Sheinbaum’s decision to alienate a potential partner, in this context, illustrates the depths of her radicalism and commitment to late-century anti-colonial ideology.

The development has disappointed Mexican observers who believed Sheinbaum’s election presented an opportunity to cool a body politic increasingly gripped by polarization. Noting the Vatican’s recent calls for reconciliation, the Mexico News Daily editorial board claimed in August that “there is considerable expectation that Sheinbaum will be less confrontational than López Obrador, who often uses his morning press conference to attack political opponents, a tactic that many say foments, or at least contributes to, divisiveness in Mexico.” It’s clear from Sheinbaum’s time as president-elect that this wishful thinking will not materialize. Like AMLO, Sheinbaum is a figure who embraces near-meaningless grievance as a means of whipping up popular support.

Sheinbaum’s signaling has implications for U.S.–Mexico relations. Millions of Mexican nationals living in the United States are eligible to vote in Mexico’s federal elections, and many did by mail and at consulates across the United States. The radicalization of Mexico’s politics, now devolving into something akin to American wokeness, impacts the perceptions and feelings of a large swathe of people living on the American side of the border. This presents a unique challenge to American sovereignty, threatening to further undermine U.S. border enforcement, trade negotiations, and impose foreign polarization on American policymakers. 

To date, Mexican leadership has generally refrained from racializing security negotiations with American leaders. Under pressure from President Donald Trump, AMLO was even willing to commit to providing border security, supplying the bulk of resources necessary to enact the “Re in Mexico” policy that helped reduce illegal border crossings to record lows in 2020. AMLO’s cooperation with Trump demonstrated that, despite his rhetoric, he was at core a pragmatist. The United States may find that Sheinbaum, at her core, is not.

If Trump is reelected in a month and moves forward with his plans to carry out the largest deportation in American history, Sheinbaum’s radicalism and embrace of racialized politics could become a major diplomatic flashpoint. It’s easy to imagine how a Mexican president, armed with cynicism and a socialist base, would benefit from accusing American leadership of colonialism, racism, or any of the other buzzwords regularly employed to justify the destruction of Western democracy. The implications for the American body politic, now including nearly 40 million people of Mexican descent, are unclear but self-evidently negative. The necessary deportation program proposed by the Trump-Vance ticket, seeking to deport 13,000 murderers among others, will already be controversial enough in an intractably polarized country. If Sheinbaum chooses to dump fuel on the fire, the consequences related to assimilation and practical security could be long-lasting and irreparable.