The electoral reform proposal presented by President López Obrador is a throwback to the days of the single party, it is a way of erasing with a stroke of the pen the last 40 years of institutional life, it is an attempt to stay in power, with López Obrador or without him, up front. The president wants to return to revolutionary nationalism and statism hand in hand with them, to the single party.
Some point of the proposal is salvageable, such as resorting to electronic voting. But for there to be confidence in these mechanisms, an autonomous body such as the INE must be maintained. What the proposal is looking for is to destroy it, end it and the independent directors. From the moment in which the councilors and magistrates of the Electoral Court are asked to be elected by direct vote, the whole essence of the electoral scaffolding that we have built in the last four decades is lost. Electing councilors and magistrates by popular vote is like deciding in the same way who will direct the general hospital or the rector of UNAM. Has no sense. Electing councilors as is currently done (two-thirds of the votes in the Senate, after selection by a committee of experts from the candidates) seems to be a good way of maintaining a certain autonomy and, at the same time, fairness. It makes no sense to change it.
The reform seeks to govern with fictitious absolute majorities. Our old model without plurinominal deputies was the one that allowed the existence of the single party. The deputies arise from their district and it does not matter if they won by one vote or by thousands: the one who wins keeps everything. And even in the last elections we have already seen how there are more and more forces of all kinds that can manipulate the vote in the districts.
The plurinominal deputies have been incorporated since the reform of Reyes Heroles in the government of López Portillo to begin to break that absolute hegemony, to give spaces, voice and vote to minorities. Let us remember that in that 1976 election, López Portillo, at the height of the supremacy of the single party, was the only candidate: the other parties, such as the PCM, were outlawed and a divided PAN preferred not to participate.
Due to one of those paradoxes of life, one of the deputies of the Communist Party who was in the first legislature as a plurinominal deputy was Pablo Gómez. He today he is the one who proposes to annihilate it.
With the senators, perhaps there could be a different movement, because the multi-member list of senators does have a problem, we have said so since it was instituted. While deputies are supposed to represent the people, senators represent the states. That there are two from the majority and one from the minority is a good formula, and so was the multi-member list, to have greater representativeness, but it turns out that with it the representation that the states have is unbalanced. It is a design flaw, which has a good intention: that the number of senators is more or less proportional to the vote of the citizens.
Without a doubt, we must reduce the financing of the parties, it has grown disproportionately, but we must establish autonomous mechanisms to control party finances, because otherwise what we will have is the return of the past: the party in the power of its resources to overwhelm its opponents and as the electoral organisms will not be in fact autonomous, the imbalance, as it was for 70 years, will be absolute.
Resources for the parties must be reduced, self-financing must be opened, but the only way to do it is with regulations that are strictly applied and with autonomous organizations that enforce them. With this proposal, what is sought is simply to hang the opponents financially.
Another absurd proposal is that of radio and television times. The current ones are an outrage that arose precisely from a demand by López Obrador after the 2006 elections, outraged by that campaign that he was a danger to Mexico. A campaign, by the way, that was no different in aggressiveness from the one carried out by his candidacy at that time and even much milder than the current campaign of denouncing his opponents as traitors to the country that is promoted directly from the presidency of the Republic.
Radio and television times must be drastically reduced for everyone, and those who want to advertise, be they political parties or citizens, must be able to do so freely. Because, furthermore, this is already happening both in the written press and on social networks and internet channels, the latter of which have ever-increasing audiences. While the conventional media is hanged, the emerging ones that sell millions in covert or covert advertising without any control, including the manipulation of fake news and smear campaigns, are left completely free.
There is much more, but let’s keep one point just to finish today. Those who lead and present this initiative are two high officials of the State security system, with access to all kinds of privileged information and resources: Pablo Gómez, director of the Financial Intelligence Unit and Horacio Duarte, director of Customs. The two have indeed spent their entire lives on electoral issues, but then why the hell are they now in such sophisticated areas of security?
The conclusion is that they have converted them via information and resources into an electoral instrument. With that combination of politics, security and money, what could possibly go wrong?
#single #game