Politics: AMLO and the judicial branch, an increasingly complicated relationship
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is at loggerheads with the judicial branch, and more specifically with the Supreme Court and the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF), which is the highest authority in the electoral field and whose decisions cannot be appealed. The President charges that the judges, appointed during previous presidential administrations, are beholden to the neoliberal past and are corrupt, dishonest, and anti-democratic.
AMLO’s criticisms also extend to the judicial branch as a whole, where many of his policies have faced obstacles in the courts, and to the Supreme Court, where through a transitory article to the judicial reform approved by Congress, the President wanted to extend Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar’s term of office by two years. This was a blatantly unconstitutional move that went nowhere after it was rejected by the other justices. Zaldivar was widely viewed as favorable to the president.
However, the issue that put relations between the executive and judicial branches in the spotlight involved the TEPJF, in which five of its seven judges sought to remove the tribunal’s president, José Luis Vargas, considered to be aligned with AMLO and widely criticized for his authoritarian way of running the Tribunal and refusal to seek consensus rulings. The judges named Reyes Rodriguez Mondragon as the new president, but Vargas refused to recognize the decision, and for a while the Tribunal had two presidents, each claiming legitimacy. Supreme Court Chief Justice Zaldívar arbitrarily decided to mediate, and in the end Judge Felipe Fuentes Barrera was unanimously elected Tribunal president. The outcome strengthened AMLO’s resolve to seek the removal of all seven members of the Tribunal’s high panel.
Everything indicates that the political reform that the President will propose to Congress at the end of this year or in 2022 will, among its components, seek the complete renewal of the National Electoral Institute (INE) board members and the TEPJF judges. This will involve a major battle for the opposition, since what is at stake is preventing the government from taking control of the two electoral institutions.
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