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CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM Pardo has become the first Jew — and first woman — to be elected Mayor of Mexico City. The candidate for the National Regeneration Movement, whose leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected president last weekend, takes the helm in the city of nearly 9 million people, which includes around 45,000 Jews.
She took 47 per cent of the vote in the election on Sunday.
55-year-old Ms Sheinbaum is the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Bulgaria and said she celebrated Jewish holidays while growing up.
She studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, earning a doctorate in energy engineering, and worked for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
The new mayor has close ties to Mexico’s new president: Mr Obrador appointed her as his Environment Minister while he himself was Mayor of Mexico City and head of the city’s government.
Ms Sheinbaum has promised to cut down on crime and governmental corruption, declaring at a recent rally: “Just because I might look like a skinny scientist doesn’t mean I’m not going to crack down on crime here. I will.” Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo
But her career has not been without controversy.
As governor of the city’s Tlalpán district, she was accused of involvement in a decision to grant construction permits to a school that collapsed in a devastating earthquake last September, killing 19 children and seven adults.
A group of victims’ families has brought criminal charges over the case and demanded that she also faces investigation.
But Ms Sheinbaum vehemently denied responsibility for the permit and accused her opponents of exploiting the tragedy for political reasons.
“WAIT AND see” is the best way to gauge the left-wing, populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Mexico’s 64-year-old president-elect has expressed his admiration for the country’s 45,000 Jews — the vast majority of whom live in the capital — but his position on Israel is less clear.
The president-elect has sought to emulate the close ties with Mexico’s Jewish community forged by President Enrique Peña Nieto, who he will formally succeed in December.
During the campaign Mr López Obrador made a point of paying tribute to “our friend” Moisés Romano, the head of the country’s main Jewish community organsation, adding that Jews were “hard-working people. They generate jobs, they are good, honest people. We trust each other.”
But just how Mr López Obrador’s election will affect relations with Israel remains largely unknown, because he has rarely spoken out on the matter. In fact, he has shown little interest in foreign affairs — and has never visited the country.
Israel has maintained close links in recent years with some other leftwing governments, such as Alexis Tsipras’ in Greece, and Mexico’s ties with Israel have generally been excellent since they formally established diplomatic relations in 1952.
But they have not always been trouble-free: in January 2017, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted a message appearing to support United States President Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the US-Mexican border, he earned a rebuke from the Mexican Jewish community saying: “We reject this position in the strongest terms.”
The tweet provoked considerable controversy in Mexico because it appeared to suggest a comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian border and Mexico’s border with the US.
But Mr Netanyahu did choose Mexico as one of the three countries, with Argentina and Colombia, he visited during his Latin America tour last