MEXICO CITY (CN) — Amid ongoing tensions between Mexico’s executive and judicial branches, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Thursday that he expects to present a reform to elect judges, magistrates and Supreme Court justices via popular vote.
“We already have a plan to present the bills I’m going to send [to Congress] in the month of February,” he said at is daily morning press conference in Mexico City.
Without expounding on the initiative, he said that he bill will be an “integral plan so that the people can elect judges, magistrates, justices — a complete reform of the judiciary.”
López Obrador has long carried on a dispute with Mexico’s judicial branch, primarily the Supreme Court. He first suggested the idea of electing judicial officials via popular vote last March, when he called the branch “rotten” and proposed reforms to legal education as well.
The idea appeared to gain traction in May, when federal deputies from López Obrador’s ruling Morena party announced their intentions to bring such a bill to Mexico’s lower house of Congress, but it did not make it to the Senate.
López Obrador is not the first to float the idea of voting for judges like politicians. A constitutional reform in 1957 toyed with the notion, but it was considered dangerous to democratic institutions even back then, according to Rodrigo Brito Melgarejo, a law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM).
“Since then, the critique has been very clear: justices elected by majority vote can feel the temptation to respond to the majorities,” he said.
Ever since Chief Justice Norma Piña Hernández became the first woman to sit at the helm of the high court last January, a small group of citizens as shown that they are more than willing to put that kind of pressure on the court.
Courthouse News spoke with several of the protesters, all of whom support Morena and López Obrador, over the course of the year. They broadly displayed a lack of understanding of how the federal government functions, specifically the Supreme Court. They accused justices whose rulings have not been in line with the president’s projects of being involved in drug trafficking and linked them to Russia’s war in Ukraine, the leftist philanthropist George Soros and several conspiracy theories.
The Supreme Court is meant to serve as a “dam against the eventual tyranny of the majority,” Brito said. “The role of the court is precisely to protect the minority against the majority via the defense of the Constitution.”
The change would jeopardize democratic institutions in Mexico, Brito said, but it is unlikely to be approved in the current Congress. Morena does not have the qualified majority necessary to approve a constitutional reform.
López Obrador appears to be banking on what he called his "Plan C," which he announced after his electoral reform was shot down by the Supreme Court last March. The plan is for citizens to vote en masse for Morena in order to allow him to get the majorities he needs to enact such reforms.
“This won’t go through with the current make-up of the Congress, but what he is seeking is for Morena to have a qualified majority in the legislature after next year’s elections and thus be able to change the Constitution,” Brito said.
That is unlikely to happen, according to political analyst José Antonio Crespo. In order to get the qualified majority needed to pass such legislation, Morena candidates would have to win in every single Senate race in all 32 Mexican states in 2024.
“Getting that 65% of the direct vote in the Senate will be extremely difficult, in fact almost impossible, because what we have also seen is that people vote less for Congress than for the president,” Crespo said.
Morena, however, is prepared to play the long game. Crespo sees the possibility of enacting this reform via secondary laws, which will end up being challenged in the court. And if López Obrador’s successor, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, wins the presidency, she will likely continue his actions to put more justices who are loyal to Morena on the bench.
With four justices voting in favor of Morena initiatives, or rather, against the unconstitutionality of such projects, reforms like this could become law down the road, Crespo said.
López Obrador has appointed four justices to the court during his term, and is in the process of nominating a fifth. If none of his second round of candidates receives a qualified majority in the Senate next week, he will be able to hand-pick one of them for the court.
Still, Sheinbaum may have to get more justices loyal to Morena on the court in order to enact the reform. In November, López Obrador appointee Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, who has generally voted in favor of the president’s projects, expressed her opposition to the reform to elect judicial officials.
What needs reformation is the appointment process itself, according to UNAM legal scholar Javier Martín Reyes.
“Popular elections have many virtues, but they are profoundly inadequate for ensuring that jurists be recognized for their technical competency and political independence,” he said. “We need a better appointment process, not crazy ideas.”
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