President Counselor Lorenzo Córdova Vianello and Counselor Ciro Murayama misrepresented the INE’s original function of guaranteeing elections as part of the democratic process and turned the Institute into an instrument for personalizing democracy, just what they criticize President López Obrador for.
From 2014 to 2022, the INE replaced its role in procedural electoral democracy and dedicated itself to granting personal democratization certificates in exchange for submission to the Institute’s authoritarianism. The abuse of the regulation and the authoritarian exercise of its powers affected the two basic functions of electoral democracy: participation and information, even placing internal regulations above constitutional mandates.
The personalization of the INE in the figures of Córdova and Murayama built an authoritarian customs that was inhibiting the possibilities of democracy in other social instances and in the end they put the electoral processes on track in decisions that perverted democracy as a citizen exercise to guarantee the free exercise of the authority vote.
The INE of Córdova and Murayama distorted the political and democratic meaning of the citizen consultation law, limited the possibilities of democracy to extraordinary budgets that they were not given and did not come out of an adjustment of the organization’s finances and the failure of the recall consultation next Sunday, April 10, it must be credited to the INE of Córdova and Murayama. The worst of the case has been the ostentatious breach of the restrictive rules for the exercise of democracy, running over the precarious political and moral authority of the two councilors to conduct one of the most important unprecedented experiences of participatory democracy.
Córdova was the product of the exhaustion of the IFE as an electoral authority and of a Peña Nieto-PAN pact to transform it so that it would remain the same. The presidency of Córdoba violated the rules that prevented continuity in the face of the change in structure and was the product of a secret agreement between Córdova and President Peña Nieto.
The previous IFE was also disbanded due to the inability of then-President Luis Carlos Ugalde in 2006 to manage the presidential election by manipulating timing and counting votes in such a way as to benefit PAN candidate Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. Ugalde was the product of a political agreement between the then teacher union leader Elba Esther Gordillo and President Fox. Due to his incompetent role as president of the Institute, Ugalde was dismissed without honor from the organization and today appears as a democratic politician who questions all decisions democratic political forces.
The IFE-INE was never able to modify its role in reproducing the vices of the Federal Electoral Commission of Manuel Bartlett Díaz in 1988. Hence the importance of a political-electoral reform that eliminates the INE and the Electoral Tribunal and creates credible bodies that do not automatically become small autonomous oligarchies of power, as is currently the case with the Institute of Córdova and Murayama.
The INE has been overwhelmed by the political practices of all the parties and has exhausted the aspect of judicialization of the electoral processes. The configuration of the General Council with eleven councilors appointed by the political parties via clandestine negotiations no longer responds to the need for an electoral body that actually allows the free exercise of political forces in electoral processes, as occurs in mature democracies.
The IFE was invented by President Salinas de Gortari as a democratic placebo, but in reality it has already operated as INE, more as an anti-democratic customs office than as a facilitator of competition between the different partisan forces. Today the INE of Córdova and Murayama has more legal disputes than examples of democratic regulation and has lost the trust of almost all the competing partisan forces.
The political-electoral reforms have not changed the authoritarian structure of the Electoral Institute insofar as its existence benefits the party in power. The challenge of Morena and President López Obrador lies in the expectation of building, now, an Institute that guarantees electoral democracy and no longer works for the intellectual whims of councilors such as barons and political commissioners.
Policy for dummies: Courtesy of former Spanish Vice President Pablo Iglesias: in politics you always have to put yourself in the place of the enemy.
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