The Democrats Could Learn a Lot From Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum

In early January, during one of her daily morning press conferences, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced an audacious goal. When the World Cup arrives at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium next summer, she’ll drive up to greet the crowds in a tiny electric vehicle made almost entirely in Mexico. Spearheaded by the newly created Ministry of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation, the Olinia project aims to eventually produce three models that will sell for between $4,500 and $7,500. Relying on the country’s sizable auto industry, Olinia vehicles are intended to reduce pollution, expand mobility options for the 70 percent of Mexicans who live in cities, and compete with affordable Chinese brands, whose dealerships are rapidly proliferating around the country.

Many in the United States have become familiar with Sheinbaum as an “anti-Trump” who deftly parries White House bluster. As Democrats search for their own answers for how to beat Trump, Sheinbaum’s domestic agenda deserves as much attention as her diplomacy. Her political party, Morena, was reelected by a landslide last June. Her predecessor’s approval rating never dropped below 60 percent; hers is currently soaring north of 80. With one of the world’s strongest electoral mandates, Sheinbaum’s government is rolling out an industrial policy that shares many of the same goals as those championed by the Biden administration: building up domestic supply chains, creating jobs, and competing in the twenty-first century’s most important growth industries. What modest progress Democrats made toward those goals has proved fragile. They lost the White House and Congress, and the GOP is now poised to dismantle Biden’s trademark achievements—not to mention the administrative state as we know it. Sheinbaum, meanwhile, has more than five years left to continue the transformative political project begun by her party when it first won the presidency in 2018.

Bidenomics’ boosters spoke in lofty terms about how the last administration heralded an end to neoliberalism. If anyone can claim the mantle of “post-neoliberalism,” however, it’s Morena. Amid endless postmortems about where Democrats went wrong, it might be worth looking beyond our borders for inspiration. What is Morena doing that Democrats couldn’t, and what can we learn from Sheinbaum’s approach?

Launched in January, Plan Mexico offers a sweeping vision for sustainable development. By 2030, it aims to create 1.5 million new jobs, train 150,000 skilled workers annually, and increase domestic content requirements, i.e., the percentage of components of a finished product that are sourced from Mexico. The plan, which includes textiles and pharmaceuticals, lays out detailed goals for specific sectors, targeting not only the development of homegrown supply chains but an expansion of the domestic market for those products, as well. A sizable portion focuses on energy and E.V.s. As part of an effort to reduce reliance on imported oil and gas, for instance—Mexico imports 70 percent of its gas from the United States—the plan aims to generate 45 percent of power from renewables by 2030. “Plan Mexico is the path that I am certain will lead us to a Mexico with more well-paid jobs, with less poverty and inequality, with greater investment and production, with more innovation,” Sheinbaum has said, and “with a lower carbon footprint that respects the environment and increases our self-sufficiency and sovereignty.”

Trump’s early jabs against both Mexico and Canada—threatening 25 percent tariffs on imports from both—have added a sense of urgency. While even Sheinbaum’s critics have praised her ability to extract concessions from Trump, who recently called her a “wonderful woman,” the chaos of recent White House trade policy has made the project of making Mexico’s economy less dependent on exports to the U.S. even more pressing.

That’s a tall order. The U.S. is Mexico’s largest trading partner, and exports to the U.S. account for some 30 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product. Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, manufacturers have structured supply chains across the continent around the expectation of free trade within its borders. Foreign manufacturers have also seen the country as an attractive entry point into the U.S., offering both exemptions from import tariffs and a skilled, relatively low-cost labor force. After the signing of the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, or “NAFTA 2.0,” in 2020, Chinese investment in Mexico in particular began to surge. The Biden administration’s subsequent decision to prioritize sourcing in key sectors from Mexico and other free trade partners promised dividends not just for Mexican exporters but for other countries to boost investment in production there too. The future of the USMCA remains in doubt, though, and the U.S. could demand strict limits on Chinese investment ahead of a scheduled review and potential renegotiation next year.

The Mexican government’s newly enthusiastic embrace of industrial policy is thanks in part to the chaos of Trump’s trade policy, said development economist Amir Lebdioui, director of Oxford University’s Technology and Industrialisation for Development Centre, or TIDE. Alongside the Mexico City–based think tank FuturoLab, TIDE recently launched, in collaboration with the Mexican government, the Oxford-Mexico industrial policy Co-Lab. Trump’s antics in recent months, Lebdioui told me, have forced economic policymakers there “to move from the passenger seat to the driver seat—they realized they have to be in control of where they want their economy to go, and they can’t just rely on the U.S. and the will of one man.”

Like the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, Plan Mexico involves considerable tax incentives for private companies to invest in research and development and advanced manufacturing. However, rather than relying almost exclusively on incentives for the private companies to invest in core sectors, as in the U.S., Plan Mexico puts the government in charge of a wide array of decisions as to where and how new building happens. That allows officials to coordinate across sectors so that developments in different fields can complement one another. Take the Olinia project: While the ultimate aim is for those cars to run on batteries made in Mexico, using lithium extracted and processed in Mexico, those batteries will also provide backup power for solar and wind power added to Mexico’s electrical grid by the state-owned electricity provider, the Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE, which is in turn working with LitioMx—a state-owned lithium firm—to establish battery production, drawing on federally funded research.

Recent changes under Sheinbaum have made more of that type of planning possible. In 2013, former President Enrique Peña Nieto liberalized the country’s grid and guaranteed private companies a segment of the market for power generation and retailing. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, rolled back some of those changes, ensuring that more than 60 percent of power generation be state-owned. Within weeks of Sheinbaum taking office, Morena successfully championed a suite of bills reclassifying both CFE and Pemex—Mexico’s long-embattled state-owned oil company—as fully public entities, eliminating subsidiaries and granting the Energy Ministry legal authority for energy planning. While inviting private-sector investment, including fully private generation capacity, recent energy reforms stipulate that CFE hold a 54 percent ownership stake in any public-private partnerships.

Alonso Romero, an adviser to the Sheinbaum campaign, told me that the ability to do more holistic planning is especially important for wind and solar. The government can craft and implement its energy plans more easily, and private developers can know exactly how much transmission capacity is available for them to connect to the grid—an ongoing problem for renewables in the U.S. “They are going to know exactly how much generation capacity can be built, and how much can be integrated into the transmission lines that are nearby. Because that planning goes hand-in-hand with Plan Mexico, they’ll know there’s going to be demand,” he said. “They’re not going to have to wait to see if a line is going to be built.” (Romero is the vice president of commercial strategy for CFE, but he spoke to me in a personal capacity.)

The government has also announced state-level initiatives that build on different regions’ natural resources and existing economic base. Plan Sonora looks to bring 1,000 megawatts of solar online by 2027 and eventually produce Olinias there that utilize lithium extracted in the state. Like Plan Mexico more broadly, Plan Sonora isn’t purely green: It also involves $16 billion worth of private investment in two separate liquefied natural gas terminals at the port of Guaymas, the end point of a massive, controversial new pipeline shipping in gas from Texas for export. Sheinbaum has reportedly also explored efforts to expand fracking—reversing AMLO’s opposition to the costly drilling method—and Plan Mexico looks to invest heavily in petrochemical production, using Pemex-produced hydrocarbons as feedstock.

As Mexico’s government looks to upgrade its economy and navigate the uncertainties of U.S. trade, climate and environmental concerns are not its top priority. “Like Build Back Better, the pitch of Plan Mexico is really about shared progress,” said Maximiliano Véjares, a senior research associate at the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at the Johns Hopkins University and author of a recent report on Mexico’s industrial policy. “There will be gender equity and an effort to take care of the southern states, which are the least developed. We will invest in these industries, and the energy transition will be fair. The discourse is about equality.” Mexico is committed to investing in E.V.s and renewables because they can be engines of strategic growth for a country with ample experience making cars and electronics, and an abundance of wind and sunshine.

That’s not to say Morena is uninterested in either climate change or the many benefits of cleaning up the grid, electrifying transportation, and reducing pollution. The reason it has the latitude to do those things, however, is the strength of a political project built on delivering tangible quality-of-life improvements. AMLO’s government brought 5.1 million people out of poverty and increased the minimum wage by 85 percent above inflation, bringing wages overall to record highs for Mexico and shrinking income disparity. Fourteen million Mexicans received cash transfers as part of an unprecedented expansion of social programs for retirees, disabled people, and students.

Bidenomics and Plan Mexico may share similar goals, but they are premised on a wildly different theory of politics. With a razor-thin congressional majority, Biden’s tariffs and tax breaks were meant to nudge the private sector to simultaneously deliver export dominance, economic progress, and votes. In contrast, by the time Sheinbaum took office, Morena had “demonstrated to the people that if the government intervenes in the market and imposes conditions, they’re going to have a better life,” as Romero put it. “Industrial policy builds on that trust.” Like the Olinia project, the future of Plan Mexico remains to be seen. What’s clear, though, is that Mexico’s voters have granted Sheinbaum and Morena as robust a democratic mandate as any government could hope for to drive forward an ambitious, twenty-first-century developmentalist project: to pass ambitious legislation that supports the project’s goals, experiment with new forms of economic governance, and build lots and lots of stuff.