Politics: Congressional priorities this session
With all major political actors likely to start filtering all their calculations through the prism of next year’s midterm elections beginning this fall, the governing camp has a pressing need to get as many bills and constitutional reforms passed during the current session of Congress in order to consolidate the power that the López Obrador administration accumulated during its first year in office. They will also be striving to lock in constitutional protections for AMLO’s signature social policies so that future administrations would have a harder time dismantling the nascent projects of access to free medical care, pension programs, and the like.
Many of those proposals could be left until after an entirely new Chamber of Deputies convenes a year from this coming September, especially considering that the opposition remains in disarray. But the governing Morena party is locked into a seemingly intractable factional fight of its own that could ultimately complicate the administration’s prospects in the 2021 congressional races. Hence, there is good reason to assume they will try to get as much as possible passed before Congress concludes its current deliberations in April.
Although there remain many points of uncertainty as to what the government’s congressional agenda will ultimately prove to be during this session, it appears likely that it could also involve efforts to stack campaign finance and electoral oversight laws in its favor, pass a single national Penal Code as well as a General Law of Civic Justice along with changes to laws on private security, and expand the powers of the Finance Ministry’s Financial Intelligence Unit, which has proven a highly useful political control mechanism.
The priority for the disparate parts of the opposition is to defend as much as possible equitable campaign rules and the INE’s autonomy, but a government proposal to drastically reduce funding for parties in a system in which virtually all campaign financing comes from public coffers puts them in a serious bind given that public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of slashing such allocations.
Now read on...
Register to sample a report