Mexico’s likely next president is of Jewish descent. Is this relevant in a deeply Catholic country?

MEXICO CITY (AP) – By mid-2024, Claudia Sheinbaum will most likely become Mexico’s first female president. She would also be the first leader of Jewish origin in a country with nearly 100 million Catholics.

On June 2, voters will choose a new president, 628 members of Congress and thousands of local offices – the largest election ever in Mexico, according to the National Electoral Institute.

Sheinbaum, a former Mexico City mayor and ruling party candidate, maintained a comfortable lead in all polls against opposition candidates Xóchitl Gálvez and Jorge Álvarez Máynez.

What role has religion played in the ongoing campaign that will elect the president’s successor? Andrés Manuel López Obrador? The answers are nuanced.

Does Sheinbaum identify as Jewish?

The 61-year-old candidate approached the question cautiously: although she is of Jewish origin, she is not religious.

All four of his grandparents were Jewish and had immigrated from Lithuania and Bulgaria. She was born in Mexico City and her parents did not raise her in any religion. According to her campaign team, Sheinbaum considers herself a woman of faith, but she has no religious affiliation.

Being Jewish can be an identity, but not necessarily a religious one, said Tessy Schlosser, director of the Jewish Documentation and Research Center of Mexico.

And Jewish identity is multifaceted, Schlosser said. This can be aligned with history, society, spirituality, geography and ideology. Even within the same Jewish community, for example, there can be divergent opinions on Zionism or genealogy.

“For some, if you’re born to a Jewish mother, you’re Jewish,” Schlosser said. “For others, if you were born of a father. For others, if you have a grandfather. So even in terms of lineage or racialization, there are many debates.

How big is the Mexican Jewish community and what is its relationship to Sheinbaum?

The first Jews arrived in Mexico in 1519, alongside Spanish colonization. The community began to grow significantly in the early 20th century, as thousands of Jews fled the Ottoman Empire to escape instability and anti-Semitism.

To date, the Mexican Jewish community is made up of Ashkenazi Jews, originally from Central and Eastern Europe, and Sephardic Jews, mainly from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Syria.

According to Renée Dayan, director of the Tribuna Israelita, which serves as a link to the Central Committee of the Jewish community of Mexico, there are approximately 50,000 Jews in the country today. The majority are settled in and around Mexico City, with small communities in the cities of Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Cancún, San Miguel de Allende and Los Cabos.

Typically, the Jewish community maintains relationships with a wide range of local authorities and does not support any particular candidate or party, Dayan said. However, he is open to meeting politicians who want to discuss their proposals and recently met with Sheinbaum, Gálvez and Álvarez Máynez.

While welcoming the dialogue with Sheinbaum, members of the Jewish community do not consider her part of their ranks, in part because Sheinbaum herself has rejected any such connection.

“Claudia actively tried to say, ‘It’s not me,’” Schlosser said. “It must be respected when a person does not wish to be identified in one way or another.”

More generally, Schlosser said, Mexican politics does not grant any special advantages to high-ranking politicians who represent social or religious diversity.

Did Sheinbaum’s Jewish identity impact the electoral process?

Mid-2023, the former Mexican president Vicente Fox wrote aboutformerly known as Twitter, that Sheinbaum was “both Jewish and foreign.”

This comment – ​​denounced as “anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic” – is not isolated. Fox was responding to criticism from another user who said Sheinbaum was “fake” for using rosary beads despite being Jewish.

Similarly, Jewish publicist Carlos Alazraki said in an interview that Sheinbaum was a “fake” for wearing a skirt bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe for the sole purpose of appealing to the Catholic electorate.

This is not the first time Sheinbaum has faced criticism. Since the official campaign began in March, Sheinbaum and Gálvez have been questioned and questioned in a country where gender bias still debates whether a woman is ready to lead Latin America’s second-largest economy .

So what role does religion play ahead of the June elections?

Although Sheinbaum has repeatedly stated that she does not practice any religion, she proudly announced a meeting she held in February with Pope Francis and has indeed worn Catholic symbols at her rallies.

Mexico is a secular state with a strong legal framework that establishes the separation of government and Church, but the Catholic presence in the country is vast.

According to the latest official report (2020), 98 million of Mexico’s 126 million people are Catholic. They are followed by 14 million Protestants, mostly evangelicals, then comes the Jewish community. More than 10 million people say they have no religion and 3 million identify as believers with no religious affiliation.

Relations between the Catholic Church and López Obrador have cooled since 2022, when several bishops sounded the alarm over increasing levels of violence in the country. It’s unclear whether the gap would narrow with Sheinbaum as president, but during her campaign she agreed to meet with Catholic leaders and reluctantly signed a national peace pledge.

“We are at a moment where we can see politicians seeking validation from religious authorities,” said Pauline Capdevielle, an academic at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “We saw it before the official start of the campaigns, when the two candidates presented themselves before the Pope.

The role of religion in the current elections became evident when thousands of people supported the presidential aspirations of Eduardo Verástegui, a right-wing activist and film producer who, although his campaign failed, echoed the voices of conservatives rejecting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

“When Verástegui’s candidacy failed, I thought that the religious issue would not have as much importance in the campaign, but little by little we found that this was the case, especially when the Catholic Church began its program in favor of peace,” said Capdevielle. said.

López Obrador and Sheinbaum said the number of homicides has decreased under the current administration. But Catholic leaders, at national forums hosted by the Church in 2023, echoed widespread fears among thousands of average citizens who shared how violence has shattered their lives.

Organized crime has long controlled swaths of Mexico through violence and corruption. In recent years, his business has diversified beyond drug trafficking, extorting protection payments from businesses large and small. Under López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy, the government has avoided direct confrontation with the cartels, allowing them to take control of a dozen or more mid-sized cities.

And while fighting violence is inevitable, Capdevielle said, the Catholic Church’s actions during the campaign could also be seen as an attempt to reclaim some of the public reputation it lost during the López Obrador’s six-year term.

Whether candidates are trying to capitalize on religion to gain votes may be debatable, but Sheinbaum, Gálvez and Álvarez Máynez were careful not to lose votes by opposing a largely conservative population.

None of them, for example, openly addressed abortion and the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

“They play with ambiguities,” Capdevielle said. “They leave aside the most ideological topics and are very attentive to these issues because we have seen that in Mexico it can have an electoral cost.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.