Claudia Sheinbaum is sworn in as Mexico’s first female president

MEXICO CITY - Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in Tuesday as North America’s first female president, taking office with the largest mandate since Mexico became a democracy a quarter-century ago.

Sheinbaum, in a white dress embroidered with flowers, took the oath in the Chamber of Deputies, where hundreds of people chanted “Presidenta!” - using the feminine form of the title. She received the red, white and green presidential sash from Ifigenia Martinez, 94, the president of the chamber, a revered leftist. Behind the new president stood a row of female soldiers.

Sheinbaum heralded her inauguration as the culmination of a fight for equality by generations of women over five centuries - household workers, Indigenous women, famous and anonymous heroines, women denied education and a place in history.

“This marks the arrival of all those who dreamed of the possibility that, one day, it wouldn’t matter if we were born a woman or man, that we could realize our dreams and desires, without our sex determining our destiny!” she said.

Sheinbaum, the former Mexico City mayor, won nearly 60 percent of the vote in June, twice as much as her closest rival. Her leftist Morena party and its allies hold ample majorities in Congress and control three-quarters of state legislatures.

Yet the 62-year-old engineer takes office amid a swirl of uncertainty. The economy is slowing, and Mexicans fear a budding cartel war in Sinaloa state. Relations with the United States have hit a rough patch.

The greatest source of unpredictability may be the Mexican political system itself.

Sheinbaum has built her political career as a loyal follower of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He is such a popular and central figure in Mexican politics that those attending the inauguration mixed cheers for Sheinbaum with slogans praising the outgoing president.

López Obrador, while a longtime icon of the left, governed with an idiosyncratic mix of policies - including nationalist energy projects, pragmatic deals with Washington and big spending on the poor. He’s concentrated power in the presidency and the military.

His Morena party is now so dominant that Mexicans are likening the new government to the one-party system that ruled for most of the 20th century. Yet in that system, it was customary for presidents to retire from politics after serving their sole six-year term. López Obrador, in contrast, is showing every sign he plans to maintain his influence in the party he founded. Many of the leading figures in Sheinbaum’s government are his loyalists.

“The strongest president in recent history will begin her term as the most constrained,” because of López Obrador’s power, the political scientist Jesús Silva Herzog Márquez wrote in the daily Reforma.

Sheinbaum pledged Tuesday that her government would not mark a return to the authoritarian governing style of the past. “We are democrats,” she declared. But, having trounced the opposition, she and her party won’t face the kinds of checks and balances that her predecessors did.

Nor is she likely to be held back by the courts. López Obrador, in his last weeks in office, rammed through a constitutional amendment to dismantle the judiciary. Going forward, Mexicans will elect nearly all their judges, including those on the Supreme Court. Legal scholars and diplomats warn of an increasingly politicized judiciary.

Sheinbaum, who holds a PhD in energy engineering, has promised to continue many of López Obrador’s programs, such as cash benefits for the poor and working class. She says, however, that she’ll replace his freewheeling style with a more scientific approach.

But she’ll have to navigate a political system built around López Obrador. In September, Morena elected his son, a shrewd political operative known as Andy, to a top party position. In another sign of the shadow cast by the outgoing president, many of the Mexicans who flocked to Sheinbaum’s inauguration celebration in the Zocalo, or central plaza, said they were there largely to show support for López Obrador.

“In all honesty, I feel sad, because my old man is leaving,” said Cristal Flores Gonzalez, 20, a student. “But I have a lot of faith in Claudia, because she was recommended by Andrés Manuel (López Obrador).”

Sheinbaum inherits a complex financial picture. Mexico’s deficit is now nearly 6 percent of its GDP, the highest since 1988, and Pemex, the state-run oil giant, is awash in debt.

Mexico became the No. 1 U.S. trade partner last year, but during López Obrador’s term, the economy grew less than under any president since the 1980s. As the U.S. economy cools, Mexico is expected to follow.

Meanwhile, the peso has lost more than 10 percent of its value since Sheinbaum’s election, in part due to investors’ nervousness over Morena’s concentration of power.

“She has to send a clear message to investors, very, very fast,” said Gabriel Casillas, chief Latin America economist at Barclays. She will need to lay out plans to stanch Pemex’s losses and reduce the deficit, he said, as well as guarantee the independence of the central bank.

Sheinbaum, who has deep experience in global environmental issues, has said renewable energy “will be the hallmark of my government.”. But analysts say she can reach her goals only by opening the energy sector to more foreign investment - an idea that’s been anathema to López Obrador.

The economy is only one of the urgent issues Sheinbaum will face.

In late July, Mexicans were stunned by news that two leaders of the Sinaloa cartel had been apprehended in New Mexico, after arriving in a private plane. One of them - Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada - later claimed he had been betrayed and kidnapped by the other, a son of drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Since then, their followers have traded attacks in Sinaloa state that have left more than 120 dead.

More broadly, Sheinbaum faces a national security threat in the growing political and economic clout of organized crime groups. Many have moved beyond drug trafficking into large-scale oil theft, extortion, migrant smuggling and other activities.

During López Obrador’s government, “a lot of groups have gotten a stronger hold over populations, politics and illicit economies,” said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Sheinbaum pledged Tuesday to tackle organized crime by improving intelligence-gathering, investigation and coordination with state and local governments. “We won’t return to the irresponsible war on drugs” fought with U.S. support in the past, she said, echoing López Obrador’s language.

Sheinbaum is more cerebral and less folksy than her charismatic predecessor, who hails from rural southern Mexico. She grew up in a Jewish intellectual family in Mexico City and followed her parents into political activism. She has signaled she’ll take a less polarizing, more inclusive approach than the pugilistic López Obrador, who bashed academics, journalists and other critics in his daily news conferences.

Sheinbaum has vowed to work productively with whoever wins the U.S. presidential election in November. But she takes office at a bumpy time in the bilateral relationship.

U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar incurred López Obrador’s wrath in August by warning publicly that his judicial transformation posed “a major risk” to Mexican democracy and a threat to investment. The Mexican leader responded by declaring a “pause” in relations with the U.S. Embassy here. (He maintained ties with Washington.)

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who was part of the Biden administration’s delegation to the inauguration, said the U.S. government has expressed concern about the judicial change “because we want companies to feel 100 percent confident about leaving China and moving to Mexico.”

Mexico’s manufacturing sector stands to receive significant investment as American firms “near-shore” their production to be closer to U.S. markets, he said. “Right now the world should be Mexico’s oyster,” he said.

The United States has become increasingly dependent on Mexico’s government to restrain migration to the border. Washington has also leaned hard on Mexico to crack down on the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl.

Sheinbaum has indicated she’ll continue López Obrador’s cooperative, pragmatic relationship with the United States. But that could be tested if former president Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, wins. He has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and floated the idea of a naval blockade aimed at Mexican drug cartels.

“The relationship with Mexico will be fundamentally different depending on what happens in the American elections,” said Murphy.

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Valentina Muñoz Castillo and Gabriela Martinez contributed to this report.