After 13 months in office, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is one of the most popular leaders in the world, with most polls showing her approval rating at around 70 percent. That’s down from nearly 80 percent a few months ago, but still the envy of dozens of presidents and prime ministers mired well below the 50 percent line in the vast majority of the world’s democracies.
Given Sheinbaum’s popularity, the scenes from the demonstrations that took place in Mexico City on Nov. 15 may seem surprising. The recent assassination of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo, a critic of Sheinbaum who had pushed for a harder line against criminal cartels, drew thousands of protesters to voice concerns about escalating violence and what they saw as the government’s failure to improve security. Demonstrators clashed with police near the National Palace after security forces erected barricades and used shields and batons to push the crowd back, leading to dozens of arrests and several injuries among both protesters and police. The images of protesters fighting police amid tear gas in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main plaza, made news globally.
But in the context of Mexican politics, in which protests are a regular part of life, last week’s events were perfectly normal. Even at the peak of his popularity, former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, widely known as AMLO—Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor—regularly faced protests from feminists, student groups and political opponents who were concerned about his attacks on Mexico’s democratic institutions. Earlier this year, under Sheinbaum, anti-gentrification demonstrators protested the large numbers of foreign workers in the country’s capital, whom they accuse of having driven up housing prices in the city. More broadly, Mexico City has always been a political stage, with its residents as prepared to deal with protests as they are to deal with the traffic congestion that afflicts the city on a daily basis.
