Mexico elected its first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum in a landslide victory in June 2024, with her left-wing party Morena (National Regeneration Movement) winning majority of the seats in both houses of the Parliament.
She takes over from party founder and former President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as Amlo, who has been a polarising figure. Critics call him a dictator and populist while his followers see him as a messiah.
Under Amlo's presidency, Mexico saw its most significant reduction in poverty and inequality since the 2000s which was a period of commodity boom in the Latin American region.
In this video, Dr Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez, Lecturer in Development Economics, explains the social policies under Amlo that led to this transformation.
"Mexico has a tradition of being an innovator of social policies. What we can learn from Mexico is that with some aggressive social policies aimed at the poorer segments of the population, we can achieve some important results," Dr Ortiz-Juarez says.
In a global context of rising inequality within countries, he suggests that such social policies will be necessary to tackle the growing income divide in emerging economies such as India, China and Brazil.
Watch the video