The approval of an electoral reform in Mexico —a little more than a year after the elections in which citizens will elect a president, deputies, senators and some mayors (June 2024)— sparked massive protests in the country last Sunday, and international critics who warn that it could put into question risk democracy.
This is a reform known as Plan B, approved on February 22 by Congress, that he had already rejected in the past a first project by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo) that proposed changing 18 articles of the Constitution and creating a body to replace the National Electoral Institute (INE), an independent body in charge of organizing elections in the country.
And although the approved norm does not include the total replacement of the INE and is, according to international media, a less drastic version of Amlo’s first idea, establishes a series of changes in said institute that, for analysts and opponents, pose “risks in the face of the elections.”
Luis Miguel Carriedo, an electoral communication specialist and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), for example, told efethat the norm thins the electoral structure in the country, while the INE denounces that the reform cuts its budget and its powers.
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What the approved reform proposes
The articles —approved in the Senate with 72 votes in favor and 50 against— reduce the salaries of the electoral body by 80 percent and Eliminates 85 percent of career personnel positions.
For example, it ends 300 district boards in charge of organizing elections at the local level, thereby reducing the number of personnel in charge of reviewing electoral operations in a country with 93 million voters. This would mean that some of the 32 states in the country, with 125 million inhabitants, have only one person in charge of the electoral office, according to experts.
The personnel in charge of training the voting juries also disappears and limits the ability to monitor electoral propaganda on radio and television, among other changes that, according to the INE, affect the updating and purification of the electoral roll in Mexico.
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love, however, accuses the INE of costing public coffers a lot of money and of having tolerated electoral fraud in the past. Therefore, it ensures that the measures will allow significant money savings and greater efficiency in voting. In the first year of the new regulations alone, he said, the country would save 271 million dollars, which could be used for social assistance and scholarships.
But the president went further with his criticisms and on Monday he dismissed the recent protests —attended by some 90,000 people who gathered in the Zócalo— stating that they are those who do not want to end corruption.
On the contrary, the INE and those who oppose it assure that the changes affect the independence of the body and that they will tip the balance in favor of the Government in the face of the 2024 elections.
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The last stage of a federal six-year term is not adequate to modify the electoral rules
The president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, said a few days ago that the reform could “profoundly disrupt the electoral system that today guarantees free elections and the renewal of public powers under conditions of legality.”
“The thinning of the structure, as well as the cutting or reconfiguration of procedures that do not respond to technical criteria, but rather to political opportunity, entails an affectation to the organic and procedural guarantees that, until now, have allowed electoral processes whose results have facilitated the alternation of rulers and provided legitimacy to those who are elected”, pointed out the INE in a report on the repercussions of the reform.
Other critics such as José Medina, president of the Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic, affirmed that “changes such as these would generate uncertainty in the 2024 electoral process and would also put at risk the autonomy of the institute, the integration of the electoral register, the control of the public resources used in the electoral process and violate what is established in our Constitution. Without forgetting that the last stage of a federal six-year term is not adequate to modify the electoral rules, and it is not common for these changes to be proposed by the president in turn “according to his column in The universal.
For his part, Tyler Mattiace, a researcher with the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, told the Associated Press that “it is worrying that all this is happening just before the 2024 (presidential) elections in a context where the president has shown very little tolerance for people who disagree with him (…). This may lead to less certainty about the results of the next elections.”
And the criticism has also spread to the international level. The head of US diplomacy for Latin America, Brian Nichols, said on Twitter on Sunday that in Mexico there is “a great debate about electoral reforms that test the independence of electoral and judicial institutions.”
For his part, the spokesman for the US State Department, Ned Price, said during a press conference on Monday that his country “respects the sovereignty of Mexico,” but that “an independent electoral system (…) constitutes one of the pillars of democracy”.
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All this can lead to less certainty about the results of the next elections
Statements to which Amlo has already responded energetically in the last few hours. “I tell Mr. (Antony) Blinken (United States Secretary of State) that there is more democracy in Mexico than in the United States (…). It is because the people govern here, the oligarchy there,” he said.
“I take this opportunity to reply to the State Department of the United States Government that, as is the bad habit, they always meddle in matters that do not correspond to them,” he added.
For now, the opposition sectors are preparing to demand the reform before the Supreme Court of Justice. For it to be invalidated, eight of the 11 magistrates must determine that it is an unconstitutional rule. A decision that must take place before June 2 if the INE is to organize the 2024 election as it has done until today.
For now, all that is missing is Amlo’s signature to ratify the reform.
ANGIE NATALY RUIZ HURTADO
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
TIME
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