HOW TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY, USING DEMOCRACY ITSELF

The triumph of the party in power in Mexico, Morena, together with its allies PT and PVEM, on June 2, has been considered by the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as the starting signal to finish dismantling all the institutions that have been taking shape in the Mexican political system in the last 35 years.

The technocratic and neoliberal elites that governed Mexico between 1982 and 2018 had the objective of modernizing the country and adapting it to the demands of an economic and technological globalization that had the United States as its main exponent.

Thus, it was established as a priority to insert Mexico into investment flows and international production chains, through trade agreements such as NAFTA with the United States and Canada; the agreement with the European Union and with several countries in Asia-Pacific and Latin America, reaching 46 treaties, making Mexico the economy with the most free trade agreements in the world.

The counterpart to this was to democratize the Mexican political system, which had been dominated by one party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, since 1929.

An attempt was made to equate the Mexican political system with the liberal democracies of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, etc. For which a kind of bipartisanship was promoted between the PRI and the right-wing PAN party, with which a co-government was established, which reached its maximum expression with the triumph of the PAN in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2006.

The left represented by the PRD was excluded from this pact, until it achieved electoral victory in Mexico City in 1997, which converted the Mexican political system into a system of three-party competition (although other minor parties have always existed).

Faced with a more competitive electoral political scenario, electoral institutions were created to guarantee impartiality and certainty in the electoral results, for which the Federal Electoral Institute and the Federal Electoral Tribunal were founded, with which the government was no longer in charge of organizing the elections.

In successive electoral reforms it was guaranteed that minorities were represented in Congress, through the principle of proportional representation.

A system of competitions was created for the election of judges and magistrates, which could give greater independence to the Judiciary.

And as a result of the signing of the trade agreements, Mexico was required to create autonomous bodies of the Executive Branch that will guarantee the accountability of the rulers, such as the Institute for Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data; fair economic competition, such as the Federal Economic Competition Commission and the Federal Telecommunications Institute; and that unfair advantages were not given to state companies in the field of hydrocarbons, for which the National Hydrocarbons Commission was created.

Likewise, the autonomy of the Bank of Mexico was reaffirmed and in the field of human rights, the National Human Rights Commission was created.

All these institutions have had to adapt over the years, and perhaps they have not done so in the best way, so it is possible that they require additional reforms.

However, the arrival of the left to power in 2018 meant a criticism of all these institutions, since President López Obrador considered them a legacy of neoliberalism and took on the task of weakening them and even disappearing them.

He was unable to do so during most of his government, given that constitutional reforms are required, for which two-thirds of the votes in both Houses of Congress are required.

López Obrador did not dare to propose the dismantling of this entire institutional framework in the first three years of his government, as he prioritized his social policy and infrastructure works, in addition to having to face the Covid pandemic.

But in the second part of his government he has proposed the disappearance of the autonomous organizations (with the exception of the Bank of Mexico), so that the functions they perform are absorbed by the secretariats of the Executive Branch, which would return to the scheme that It was thought to have been overcome, of an enormous concentration of power in the president, something that was characteristic of the period dominated by the PRI.

Proportional representation in Congress would also be eliminated, so political minorities would no longer have representation; the re-election of legislators and municipal presidents would be eliminated (this proposal is promoted by the elected president Claudia Sheinbaum), which would weaken Congress, since the legislators would not seek endorsement of their actions in the electorate, but rather the support of the party leaders; the judges, magistrates and ministers of the Court would be chosen by popular election, and even the president has stated that they should not be required to have experience, which would imply that people without sufficient knowledge, and dependent on the electoral structures of the majority party, would be those elected to the Judiciary.

In short, the June 2 victory of the official party, given its magnitude (60% against 40% of the opposition), is being interpreted by the current president and the president-elect as a mandate to completely reconfigure the incipient Mexican democracy, and convert it again into a hegemonic party system, with an all-powerful Executive Branch that has the other two powers as subordinates.

Thus, democracy will have served so that the winners of the elections end up eliminating the institutions that guarantee that same democracy.