On February 22, 2023, the Mexican Senate voted on legislation that will drastically transform the electoral aspect of Mexico’s democracy. That is, if the courts declare the legislation to be constitutional.
The set of austerity measures to be placed on the National Electoral Institute, first proposed by President López Obrador, could threaten the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential election in 2024. Before diving into the intricacies of the legislation being discussed, it is useful to contextualize Mexico’s historical struggle with democracy.
The end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920 and the formation of a constitutional republic was eventually followed by the formation of the most dominant political party in Mexican history in 1929. Initially called the National Revolutionary Party (PNR), today it is known as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Despite the changes in its name, the party founded by Plutarco Elias Calles would come to dominate local and federal elections for decades.
The electoral dominance experienced by the PRI was unique in that it was far from democratic, yet experts have always refrained from referring to the party’s rule as full-out authoritarian. This is in part because of the popular support and high levels of participation that the citizenry engaged in. Yet the PRI’s history is easily marred by their usage of coercion that, at times, came in the form of violent suppression and electoral manipulation.
The height of state-sanctioned violence came in 1968, just 10 days before Mexico held the Olympics. Student protests gathered in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City to voice their frustration on how riot police dealt with an altercation between two rival high schools after a soccer match. Little did the protestors know, a number of them would experience the same brutality that the high school kids had as well.
The college students and faculty, whose institutions had direct links to the high schools, protested the brutality, but were violently suppressed in the process. Military snipers were positioned around the protest site, and, after a number of speakers finished, the snipers opened fire. Estimates of the death toll range from 25 to 300, with the official number being relatively unknown.
The manipulation of elections is also a hallmark of the PRI’s receding dominance. The height of their fraud took place in 1988, when PRI candidate Carlos Salinas “beat” Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the head of a leftist coalition. The LA Times reported that burnt ballots for Cardenas were found in districts all over the country. To top it all off, the government at the time failed to comply with Cardenas’s effort to certify the results, even after six of the seven registered opposition parties involved sounded the alarm of electoral manipulation.
We have seen how the PRI not only engaged in state-sanctioned violence against protestors but also how they actively engaged in rigging the electoral system. It is this convoluted relationship with the one-party rule that led to the restructuring of the Mexican electoral system, and this has primarily come in the form of centralization.
The election fraud of 1988 and the public discontent that followed directly led to constitutional reforms that allowed for the formation of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). The sole purpose of the IFE was to act as an “autonomous, public organization” that oversaw and “organized federal elections.”
While this worked out relatively well at the federal level, local elections were still left vulnerable to fraud, which led to further reforms and the eventual transformation of the IFE into the National Electoral Institute (INE). The reforms have largely dealt with mainstreaming the electoral process even further, with coordination and organization efforts taking place at the local level as well. This reform can be seen as an even more aggressive centralization of the electoral system.
Public support for the INE has been relatively high. Many people in Mexico to this day live with the memories of the PRI and their actions in the late 20th century. That being said, Obrador’s reforms present the potential reality of retrogression, with Mexico’s young democracy threatened.
The leftist Moreno party (president Obrador’s party) and their allies in the Senate voted 72-50 on Feb. 22 to drastically cut the INE’s budget. The austerity measure would result in a drastic reduction of staff, drastically hampering the ability of the organization to function. Furthermore, the INE is responsible for issuing voter ID cards to all of the population, free of cost. Defunding this organization threatens the ability for them to continue doing so.
All in all, the fear that election results will be manipulated again like they were in 1988 has resulted in some of the largest protests in Mexico in recent memory. Protests started last November when the policy measure began to pick up steam, and the most recent protests occurred last Sunday. On both occasions, tens of thousands of peaceful protestors gathered in the center of Mexico City wearing pink and white – the colors of the INE.
Protests like these let us know that democracy, to a certain extent, is doing its job. It is the legislative and judicial response to these protests that will dictate the trajectory of Mexico’s democracy, however. If elections are once again unprotected in Mexico, there is a potential that protests will be treated like they were in 1968 instead.
It is now in the hands of Mexico’s judicial branch to decide if the legislation is constitutional or not. Their decision could either reassure the INE of its protected status, or it could open the door for a troubling election in 2024. Until then, those who favor democracy will be anxiously waiting.
