Members of the two chambers of the Mexican Congress, which were elected in June this year following general elections, took their seats in a tense atmosphere, as the official majority uses only one senator from the qualified majority in both chambers, allowing for controversial reforms to the Constitution.
In the Chamber of Deputies, the National Reconstruction Movement (Morena), to which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador belongs, and its allies chanted “yes we can” when the two-thirds majority was officially announced.
With this, they will be able to approve twenty constitutional changes proposed by the president, including the controversial reform of the Judiciary, which has sparked many protests in this sector and has provoked criticism inside and outside the country for its impact on the independence of the states. Mexican justice.
The changes include a proposal to restructure the judiciary to elect judges by popular vote, which critics say will erode the independence of the judiciary. They also include the elimination of independent organizations that serve as a counterweight to the government, such as transparency organizations or organizations that fight for free competition.
“Resistance, resistance” were the slogans of the opposition in the Chamber of Deputies, while their cries were overshadowed by the voice of the ruling party.
Opposition parties and citizens filed thousands of complaints with the electoral court seeking to ensure that Morena had more power in Congress than in elections, but the court rejected them and the ruling party obtained the power it wanted due to its coalition pacts and its ambiguous electoral law in force.
But a qualified majority in the Senate is also needed to change the Constitution, and that has not yet been achieved. However, Morena will surely obtain the support of the senator, which it lacks.
For now, he has already managed to recruit two opposition senators from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who lost their national registration for failing to achieve the minimum 3% of votes in the June 2 elections. He needs to get the support of another senator to have a qualified majority.
Defections by members of parliament are not a new phenomenon in Mexican politics and have occurred repeatedly, despite criticism that these partisan jumps often lead to ideological disparities between organizations.
While President-elect Claudia Scheinbaum, a member of Morena, celebrated the arrival of new deputies Araceli Saucedo and José Sabino, the opposition called them traitors and warned their parliament about the pressure they could face to recover lost votes on constitutional issues.
A series of constitutional reforms that will redesign important parts of the Mexican State, and although they were proposed in February by López Obrador and studied by the ousted deputies, will be voted on by the members of the new Legislative Assembly, starting on December 1st. September, when Congress began its sessions.
A constitutional amendment would also require approval by two-thirds of state legislatures, but Morena and its allies already have that majority.
