Mexican court overrules president’s proposal to change election laws
Mexico’s top court on Thursday struck down a key element of a sweeping election law backed by the president that allegedly undermined the country’s election oversight body and helped push the country away from the one-party system.
The Supreme Court ruling is a major blow to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has argued the plan would make elections more efficient, save millions of dollars and allow Mexicans living abroad to vote online.
The electoral measures were passed early this year by Congress, which is controlled by the president’s party, and would have applied to next year’s presidential race. While Mr López Obrador may not seek re-election, the candidate chosen by his party will most likely be a firm favourite.
The bill would have reduced the National Electoral Institute’s workforce, reduced its autonomy and limited its power to punish politicians for violating electoral laws. Civil liberties groups said the measures would have hindered an important pillar of Mexican democracy.
“The goal was to transform the entire electoral system,” said Ernesto Guerra, a political analyst in Mexico City. “It was a 180-degree turn to the rules of the democratic game.”
As relieved as some Mexicans were by the ruling, some also worried that Mr López Obrador would try to turn the legal setback to his advantage and rally his base around the idea that the judiciary is corrupt. During a morning speech on Thursday in which he anticipated the verdict, he entered the court.
“It’s an invasion, a break-in,” Mr López Obrador said.
He said he would present an initiative “in due course” to allow members of the judiciary to be elected like the president or senators. “It has to be the people who choose them,” he said. “They should not represent an elite.”
The court last month had invalidated another part of the bill, which related, among other things, to changes in publicity rules in election campaigns.
By throwing out the remaining portion of the bill by a vote of nine to two, the judges pointed to violations by lawmakers of legislative process, saying the changes were made in just four hours and members of Congress had not been given a reasonable time to know what they were voting on.
“As a whole, they are so serious that they violate the constitutional principles of Mexican democracy,” Judge Luis María Aguilar said during the court’s discussion. “Failure to respect the rules of legislative procedure is constitutional disloyalty.”
José Ramón Cossío, a lawyer who is a former member of the court, said Mr López Obrador and his allies pushed forward the changes known as “Plan B” “in such an arrogant, violent, abusive manner way they lost.”
Experts described the court’s decision as a major setback for Mr López Obrador’s administration, which has made reforming the electoral system a top priority.
The government had defended the changes as a necessary step to reduce “the bureaucratic costs” of elections and ensure that “there is no more fraud” in Mexico.
“The rule of law has never been threatened with the adoption of the reforms,” said the president’s legal adviser wrote in a statement in March. “It is not true that the fundamental rights of citizens are at risk.”
With Plan B scrapped, next year’s elections will be governed by the same rules under which López Obrador and his party, Morena, came to power, Guerra said.
“This gives me peace,” he said. “We see the burial of this reform coming out of and for political power.”
But fears remain that the ruling could be used against the judicial system, which has already come under fire from the president for rejecting a number of his administration’s initiatives, including one that would have transferred the newly created National Guard from civilian to military control. . The court ruled that this was unconstitutional.
“This defeat was deliberately pursued in order to appropriately assume the role of victim and erect the perfect enemy,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre, an expert in constitutional law and ethics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Narratively, this defeat becomes more of a win.”
The risk, analysts warn, is long-term damage to the judiciary. “Justice as we know it, with all its shortcomings, may suffer a setback,” said Mr. Garza Onofre.
The president, he added, would be careful “to cool heated tempers”.
“We know that’s not going to happen,” he said.