close
close

Mexico's president proposes appeal to Supreme Court amid looming constitutional crisis | Mexico

Mexico's president proposes appeal to Supreme Court amid looming constitutional crisis | Mexico

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has accused the country's Supreme Court of overstepping its mandate and “trying to change the decisions of the Mexican people” as it prepares to debate scrapping parts of a transformative judicial reform.

The court is expected to vote Tuesday on whether the controversial reform violates other parts of the Constitution, setting up a showdown with Sheinbaum barely a month after he took office.

The move would move Mexico toward a system in which nearly all of its judges, including the Supreme Court, are elected by popular vote.

No other country in the world has such a system. The United States elects lower-level judges, while Bolivia elects 26 judges to all of its highest courts. But in Mexico, thousands of positions at all levels would be put to a vote.

Supporters say the reform is necessary to root out corruption in the justice system. Opponents say it will do little to fight corruption but will give the ruling Morena party control of the courts while giving organized crime groups another chance to push their candidates through elections.

“It needs to be made very clear that eight justices cannot be above the people,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday.

Morena already wields a level of political power not seen in Mexico in decades after her landslide election victory in June gave her a supermajority in Congress and control of enough state legislatures to amend the constitution at will.

Since then, a number of changes have been passed, including judicial reform in September.

The justice system itself has spoken out strongly against the reform with strikes and protests. Although three members of the Supreme Court have said they support the reform, the other eight showed their opposition by saying they would not run in the elections scheduled for August 2025.

The court will now discuss whether the judicial reform violates existing provisions of the constitution in order to ultimately prevent progress.

This has already led lawmakers last week to pass another amendment that prevents the court from considering legal challenges to constitutional reforms, potentially overturning any decision by the court.

This means that if the Supreme Court actually votes against judicial reform, Mexico will be in uncharted territory. And Sheinbaum must decide whether to ignore the ruling or abide by it.

“This will lead to a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have not experienced in the entire duration of the 1917 Constitution,” Olvera Rangel told Proceso, a Mexican magazine.

The dispute dominated the agenda in Sheinbaum's first month in office, diverting attention from other issues such as the expansion of social programs, the further militarization of public safety and increasing violence in states such as Sinaloa and Chiapas.

It has also unsettled markets, causing the peso to depreciate more than 15% against the dollar and drawing rare public criticism from the United States, Mexico's largest trading partner, which said it threatened democracy and the rule of law in the country Country.

To defuse the crisis, a Supreme Court judge, Juan Luis González Alcántara, has proposed a compromise: the highest courts should stand for election, but the thousands of other judges should not.

But it's unclear whether the other Supreme Court justices would agree, let alone Sheinbaum and her party.

Sheinbaum inherited judicial reform from former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who founded Morena and became frustrated when the courts blocked some of his key policies.

Even if Sheinbaum were inclined to negotiate with the Supreme Court, she could face resistance from power brokers in Morena.

In any case, she showed no signs of giving in and accused the court of being a political actor and of violating the Constitution itself.

On Monday, she added that her government had a plan in case the court violated judicial reform: “We are prepared no matter how they vote.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *