“We were governed by a single party that supported a monarchical presidency.”
Jose Agustin Ortiz Pinchetti
Mexico City.- It is not surprising that the announcement was made by Manuel Velasco, the senator of the Green Party. On August 26, after registering as a senator, he stated that “we do not lack” senators to achieve a qualified majority. “It is being built on, we have been in dialogue with everyone. There is a very broad possibility that work will be done on it. We have been in dialogue with senators from the opposition.”
Velasco was the operator who, in 2018, after having campaigned in alliance with the PRI, negotiated the transfer of the entire Green Party bench to the Fourth Transformation. With this, he confirmed his party’s vocation to always join whoever holds power. It is logical that he had to announce the purchase of the three seats in the Senate that the government lacks for a qualified majority.
The Morena supporters can no longer continue to say that judicial reform “is a mandate from the people.” There is no doubt that Claudia Sheinbaum achieved a resounding victory, with 59.75 percent of the votes, even though it was in the most unequal contest since the days of the hegemonic party. However, the wise people only gave Morena and its satellite parties 54 percent of the votes for Congress. It was not a mandate to reestablish a single-party regime.
The INE granted Morena and its allies a qualified majority with 364 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, in addition to 83 in the Senate, three short of the qualified majority. Its interpretation of Article 54 of the Constitution ruled out the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence thesis of 1998, drafted by then-minister Olga Sánchez Cordero, which stated that the distribution of plurinominal legislators “must be done taking into account not only the literal text, but also the value of political pluralism that it protects.”
But not only did the INE not heed this thesis of jurisprudence, but now the 4T is openly buying senators that it did not obtain at the polls in order to achieve that qualified majority that will allow it to make constitutional reforms without negotiating them with the opposition and, above all, to give the executive control of the judiciary. The desire to give “a gift” to López Obrador is so strong that any other consideration is superfluous.
Is it legal to buy senators elected by the opposition to form part of the ruling party? Unfortunately, yes it is. Our parliamentary system allows the purchase of seats and consciences. In 2018, the PVEM, which competed in that year’s election allied with the PRI and Nueva Alianza, in the Todos por México coalition, transferred its 17 deputies and seven senators to the López Obrador government’s party. It was an act of opportunism that betrayed the vote of the voters, who voted for the Green Party with the idea that it represented a different option to Morena. It is very likely that the agreement was made before the election as a ploy to give AMLO a presence in Congress that he did not obtain at the polls.
Overrepresentation in Congress is taking us back to the days of the single party. José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti, the lawyer who fought so many battles alongside López Obrador, and who was faithful to him until his death on August 3, recalled those times in Two Brothers, One Country, a book written with his brother Francisco that is being presented today: “A system that was renewed only to let a different group in. There was no authentic rule of law. The privileged groups could impose not only the court rulings but the laws themselves.” López Obrador is taking us back to that single-party system.
Pause
“They have to learn to respect our sovereignty,” AMLO said yesterday, and declared a “pause with the US embassy.” What does this mean? Nobody knows. At the beginning of his administration, he also declared a “pause” with Spain, without any consequences. It is nothing more than the expression of a tantrum.
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