In a political analysis program, I listened suspiciously as the panelists tore their clothes off and predicted that if the electoral reform were carried out, we would be on the verge of the end of democracy in Mexico. There are those who even use surveys or surveys of citizen opinions (official, prestigious and apocryphal) on this subject, with the purpose of wanting to convince, making reckless statements about how it is that “the people” (as they usually refer to it) want or does not want said reform, of course, depending on the position adopted by each person.
I believe, except for your best friend reader opinion, that we have to be honest and objective on this subject. To begin with, the rhetorical use of what they call “the people” or “the people” is nothing more than an argumentative entelechy supposedly used to give legitimacy to radical positions that often resort to the use of sophisms to try to convince.
Those people to whom they refer, that is to say, the ordinary citizens, do not have in their great majority a firm, clear and objective idea of everything that is contemplated to reform the constitution and secondary legislation in electoral matters, as well as neither the real implications of what this would bring. The perception or idea that as ordinary citizens we have about the aforementioned reform is very diffuse, because except for the flashes that the President has released about it in his mornings, what prevails in the media are radical positions of the political class, business or organizations supposedly citizens who, instead of responsibly socializing the issue, end up distorting it.
What is an unquestionable reality is that with the creation of the IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) in 1990, and its transition to INE (National Electoral Institute) in 2014, a milestone was marked in the democratic life of our country, to a degree such that not only has it allowed alternation in power, but the organizational and logistical model with which it operates was taken up as a model by other countries.
However, considering precisely the vicissitudes that gave shape to this electoral body (which has full autonomy, legal personality and its own assets as of 1996), we can understand that just like any other scaffolding created over the years, years to strengthen democracy, the INE should not be seen as something finished and imperfect.
And how can we pretend that this is the case if modern democracy itself, differentiated it is true, but finally becoming Athenian, has been and will always be an unfinished process that has made its way through so many ideological, social and revolutionary struggles against the monarchies, dictatorships and oligarchies. Thus, taking into account the premises of Aristotle himself more than two thousand three hundred years ago, we can infer that neither democracy nor much less its institutions are at any time an end in itself, but rather a means or means perfectible placed at the service of the human community.
By virtue of the foregoing, our citizen responsibility compels us to search for, disaggregate and discern the information that has been circulating about this electoral reform in question (one more to the eight that there have been from 1990 to 2014), in order not to fall prey to Manichean positions that allege, on the one hand, that almost everything is wrong and radical changes must be made to our political-electoral system, and on the other hand that of those who say that everything is perfect and nothing needs to be changed.
In this sense, I consider very eloquent and precise the words of the Director of Electoral Training and Civic Education of the INE itself, Roberto Heycher Cardiel, who in the presentation of the report presented in 2020 by that institute, declared: “Providing quality public information is one of the key aspects for democratic resilience. The dissemination of socially useful information contributes to the creation of an environment conducive to the use of collective intelligence and the broadening of the horizons that originate from the free discussion of ideas”,
Considering then that there is much to change to improve the INE, above all the excessive expenses and stratospheric salaries that they disburse, as well as the normative and operative duplicity of having local electoral bodies to mention only two of the most evident; it is then also very sensible and The position of the local PAS party is prudent, which in the voice of its moral leader, Héctor MelesioCuén Ojeda, indicated that they will not participate in the march called this Sunday in defense of the INE, since as a political institute, it expressed: “we have proposals in what the electoral reform is, but they are proposals with 220,000 signatures, there is one that has 280 or so thousand signatures, we certainly do not agree with the disappearance of the INE, what we want is for it to improve in all senses and We have very clear proposals.”
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