Mexican Democracy On the Brink

The far-left Morena party's overwhelming victory introduces a path to major reforms that could transform the federation back into a one-party state.

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This week I decided to write about democracy in Mexico. Though That Patchwork was primarily conceived of focusing on matters within the U.S., where compelling issues of democracy and decentralization do arise abroad, I will entertain them as subjects in future posts if there is something relevant or valuable to be gleaned from them.

-Robert

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As a subset of Americans panic over democracy ending in November our friends south of the border find themselves at substantial risk of the sort of “democratic backsliding” so casually attributed to the U.S. by certain corners of its media.

Earlier this week, the far-left Morena party in Mexico overwhelmingly prevailed in this year’s general election. Morena is all but expected to earn a two-thirds majority in congress, or very close to it, enough to pass constitutional reforms unilaterally.

Reports frame the victory as a referendum on the fiery incumbent president and standard bearer of Morena, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO for short, who has proposed throughout his tenure major changes to government in the name of glorious democracy. His successor will be Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, who won the endorsement of AMLO, and became the first woman and Jewish person elected president. She’ll be inaugurated on October 1.

AMLO had proposed a range of constitutional reforms designed to cement his legacy if not his party’s power. The changes would unambiguously alter Mexican democracy, something that has only existed in earnest since 2000. Before that, the Mexican federation was a one-party state dating back to the 1917 Mexican Revolution.

The reforms — or “systemic changes” if you’re feeling especially revolutionary — include eliminating seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the Mexican Senate determined by proportional representation, making it more difficult for multiple parties to vie for seats. He’s also proposed replacing existing electoral officials with popularly elected ones at the national level and eliminating local offices of the Electoral Institute, which oversees election administration. He’s also proposed dissolving a number of independent regulatory bodies like the National Institute for Transparency and the Federal Economic Competition Commission. Their authority would transfer to the executive.

Then there’s the judiciary. Federal judges would be replaced with popularly elected ones. Ten judges would each be nominated by the congress, the executive and the Supreme Court, the lattermost of whom would also be popularly elected by a national vote. Control of the National Guard would be transferred to the military, further militarizing public security, reducing civilian oversight and increasing executive control over public safety. The presidential recall threshold would be lowered from 40 to 30 percent meaning that only 30 percent of the registered electorate would need to participate in a recall election for the result to be binding.

Yet, reforms don’t pass until they pass.

Sheinbaum earned the endorsement of AMLO and she’s coasted to the presidency as an effective heiress to his vision for the country. She has also been perceived as reserved and even aloof, a data driven former climate scientist who has fought the perception that she will be a carbon-copy of her predecessor, except hardly as charismatic. Departing from the agenda that arguably earned one’s seat could be risky. One report says that while she has endorsed the proposed reforms, there’s speculation that this may have been done out of political expediency and that what she has in mind may be malleable.

To me, at least, all of these reforms read like those that a party would seek if it wanted to significantly increase its odds of retaining power, even with disproportionately lower shares of the vote in future elections.

Now, in many of the American states, we do elect judges that interpret state laws and county clerks that oversee election administration, some of whom even run in partisan elections. The key differences, of course, being that these officials are not elected by a national popular vote and that they are not accountable to or overseen by a federal executive. Instead, their power is checked by a hierarchy of dispersed oversight. Since the election of electoral officials and judges would be determined by a national popular vote, any shift toward politicization would affect the entire federation’s judicial and electoral systems. Ostensibly, as an example, this would be the equivalent of the Democratic Party, after the 2020 election, overseeing the authentication of election results in even the deepest red counties in the country. Not exactly a way to sow trust in the system!

This gets at how the facade of the popular vote, while attractive to many small-d democrats, can be counterproductive to retaining a stable and plural democracy, especially in a country as large as Mexico. Apart from the aforementioned issue of ignoring scale, “popularizing” — or politicizing, one should say — more offices eliminates more checks on the people themselves, who, are no wiser and no less prone to cognitive biases and plain idiocy than the people they elect. It’s akin to framing the imprudent demolition of a dam as an innocuous means to allow water to freely flow to the people downstream. And if we’ve learned anything from the election of populists around the world it is that, alarmingly and somewhat paradoxically, the people don’t actually trust the people entirely either. A conceivable result is a populace so mired in fairness of its future elections that it manufactures a pretext for greater executive intervention.

Sheinbaum doesn’t take office for another four months. Upon her election the Mexican peso fell 3 percent, an observation viewed as rare within the currency market given its relative strength to the dollar. Mexico faces rampant cartel violence, a strained health care system, illegal migration into its own borders from Central America, among other issues. In her victory speech, the president-elect sought to quell concerns that checks on central power would be weakened.

“We are democrats,” she said, “and out of conviction would never be an authoritarian or repressive government.”

That Patchwork is a first-of-its-kind newsletter about democracy, economics and culture from a decentralist angle. Today, fewer people are seeking more power over American life. To preserve a pluralist democracy will mean challenging the entrenched premise that observations, ideas and solutions are best made with a federal or national interest.

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