Will Sheinbaum be an antidote to the exodus of young people to the extreme right?

Almost at the same time I read the news about the election of the new president of Mexico, I read the one that said that young people are emigrating towards the dogmas of the extreme right, something that is disconcerting if you think that the youth world has almost always placed itself under the banners of the left, of revolutionary and modern ideas of freedoms.

It has been the young people who have turned characters of the revolutionary extreme left into idols. Suffice it to remember the cult of young people to Che Guevara and in Brazil to the revolutionary Lula. Hardly in the past did young people, even from the most traditional families, seem conservative.

The young man carries in his blood the revolutionary vocation, the breaking of traditions, the search for the new. And that is why he has always tended to identify rather with the ideas and myths of the extreme left. Why today this exodus suddenly towards the most degraded dogmas that combat everything that smacks of leftism?

According to the most serious political analysts, this exodus of young people to the extreme right, even fascist, is due to the fact that they no longer see in the traditional and revolutionary left the ideal that inspired them. And they make serious accusations against today’s left, starting here in Brazil, of having lost its revolutionary vigor, of having become bourgeois, of lacking the great ideals of the past in favor of the most abandoned, of being active in politics to enrich themselves. and their families, for having fallen into the sinful networks of corruption. They complain that the new politicians of the left have lost the strength of the illusion that characterized them and live, as Lula himself confessed in a moment of sincerity, to obtain positions for themselves and to enrich their families.

To this we must add that for today’s young people the old left did not know how to capture or prepare young people to take over. And so the left-wing parties have often become clubs of conservatives incapable of giving way to the new generations who are also the most modern because they were born in the digital age, while the left continues clinging to the analogue one.

The loss of the caravans of young people tempted to see in the extreme right new ideals of struggle against a system that they consider old, urgently needs leaders who know how to connect with great ideals, capable of respecting the competence of their politicians, the strength of their challenges and their personal honesty.

This prologue has been inspired in me, like a shower of hope, by the Mexican novelty of having elected not only a woman as president, something unusual in an atavistically sexist country, but a woman who would apparently have all the characteristics to excite, attract and admire the new generation of young people always in search of experiences of breaking with the status quo, of revolutionary dreams.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the new president of Mexico, from a Jewish family, in these stormy moments of Israel and the massacre in Gaza, presents a rosary of qualities that could attract disillusioned young people to the temptations of a radical right that presents itself as revolutionary . And that’s because a good part of the left appears bourgeois in their eyes.

In this case, Claudia Sheinbaum would have all the qualities that today, as yesterday, young people disillusioned by a left that seems to have renounced its past essences that excited young and old are looking for. Sheinbaum brings together that series of qualities that young people have always looked for in the left, even the most revolutionary ones.

Her almost plebiscitary election indicates that so many young people, disillusioned with traditional politicians, bourgeois, corrupt and often without any cultural background, have seen in her a series of qualities that have given them back a bit of hope. And the new president brings together a series of qualities that seem to coincide with the dreams of young people who are beginning to distrust politicians or feel attracted to the most radical ones on the right who present themselves as the new solution for our uncertain future.

And Sheinbaum is a scientist. She is an intellectual, with important university degrees, who knows how to speak with authority and at the same time with human warmth. She is openly leftist, but a modern leftist that embraces all the most progressive causes in the world today, from ecology to the ardent defense of the trampled rights of women. She does not flirt with the new fallacies of the fascist right. She does not hide her political line that is open to all the challenges of the historical moment that humanity is experiencing and she has her eyes and ears attentive to the dreams and disappointments of young people with a democracy in tatters and a destructive right.

Will the new Mexican president be a woman, a scientist, culturally prepared with a pulse but who also knows how to listen and smile, who is not ashamed to confess that she is from that left, which has always attracted young people for its utopias? The politician who did not know corruption. Will it be a new window opened in Latin America and a hope for that world today bewildered by young people who need new leaders, who are shaken by the demonic temptation to emigrate towards extremisms that castrate illusions?

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