Politics: Major political reform may be off the table but AMLO sustains his assault on the INE

MEXICO - Report 28 Nov 2022 by Guillermo Valdes and Francisco González

It’s a foregone conclusion that President López Obrador will not succeed in passing his political reform constitutional amendments through Congress this year or any time before he leaves office. He has failed to line up enough votes, and if there was any doubt whether the PRI might once again support one of AMLO’s reforms, the success of the November 13 protests in support of the INE and in defense of democracy was a clear reminder of the steep political-electoral costs such an embrace would have entailed.

But the president is in no way backing down from his efforts to radically reconfigure the electoral and political party system in ways that could ensure that the supporters of his Fourth Transformation project will maintain a firm grip on power for some years to come. He has three more options for achieving this once he has Congress go through the motions of debating his original constitutional amendments in the coming days.

One, which AMLO has called his "Plan B", consists of modifying secondary laws on electoral practices and political parties in the hope that there won’t be enough supreme court justices to confirm their obviously unconstitutional character. Another comes with the selection of four new members on INE’s 11-member governing council as the terms of four current councilors, including the president and other major councilors conclude next April 3. And yet another involves continuing to starve the INE of necessary funds.

This week we analyze two of these threats: that of the constitutional reform, which despite being essentially doomed to failure between now and 2024, is revealing of President López Obrador’s true intentions in terms of the type of electoral and public representation systems that he wishes to establish as an extra and very important condition for consolidating his model of centralized governance. The other is the election of the four new INE councilors, since that is the card that he will play in the coming months to try to control the performance of the electoral referee in the next federal elections.

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