In the first test of its kind in the world, Mexico has launched a bold experiment to reshape its judiciary. Instead of judges being appointed, as they once were, Mexican citizens ticked off their favorites at the ballot box this month.
With the first batch of this initial two-part process complete, President Claudia Sheinbaum has declared Mexico “the most democratic country in the world.”
But global observers are more circumspect about the election by popular vote of more than 2,600 judicial positions, from Supreme Court justices to local magistrates, and its effect on democracy.
Why We Wrote This
Everyone agrees the justice system in Mexico needs to be revamped. But where the ruling power sees its new reform as a leap forward, others believe Mexico has just moved several steps backward.
Free and fair elections are an essential building block of democracy. But the voting process has been criticized for being rushed. The reform became law in September, and Mexico’s electoral institute operated a barebones budget – about half of what they requested from Congress – to carry out the vote on June 1. Critics also complain about inconsistencies in how candidates were vetted; a low bar to run for a position, potentially undermining professionalism in the judiciary; and a strikingly small voter turnout.
The process favored candidates associated with President Sheinbaum’s left-leaning party, Morena. The party controlled two of three candidate-vetting committees and party affiliates distributed “cheat sheets” in the lead-up to the vote, indicating their preferred candidates. All nine seats on Mexico’s Supreme Court were filled by candidates with Morena ties. This essentially puts control of the executive, legislature, and judiciary into a single party’s hands, erasing the democratic value of checks and balances by independent powers.
The Organization of American States warned it “does not recommend that this model of selecting judges be replicated [in] other countries” in a preliminary report published June 6.
In some unexpected ways, the judiciary is more democratic now, says Alex González Ormerod, director of The Mexico Political Economist, which covers Mexican policy and politics. “But not necessarily for the better.”
Toya Sarno Jordan/Reuters
The democratic wins are straightforward. People exercised their vote, which lends the branch more legitimacy. New conversations around what a “fair” judiciary should look like emerged. The first Indigenous justice has won a seat at the Supreme Court.
But unfortunately, says Mr. González, who served as an election observer during the vote, each of these “wins” comes with a caveat.
“Is it more democratic because people voted consciously, knowing who they were voting for? No, people had no idea who they were voting for,” he says. “Very few people voted, and those who voted struggled or did it because they were told to” by political parties.
Only 13% of the electorate cast ballots, one of the lowest levels of participation in Latin American elections, and a small fraction of the nearly 61% that turned out to vote in Mexico’s 2024 presidential race. Some 20% of the ballots were “spoiled,” or cast in protest, instead of for specific candidates.
In Mexico City, lines at polling stations were short compared to past votes. But the list of candidates was long – nearly 8,000 names. Voters received nine, text-heavy ballots in a rainbow of color codes. According to the OAS report, the voting process itself took voters between 10 and 20 minutes to complete. OAS mission observers documented cases of elderly voters taking up to an hour to complete the “extremely complex” ballot.
Few in Mexico’s polarized society believe the current justice system is serving the population. Nearly every crime committed goes unpunished, with an impunity rate of 95%. Police are underpaid and poorly trained, prosecutors have little capacity to gather evidence, and pretrial detention is widely used. In December 2022, some 40% of Mexico’s prison population were people in pretrial detention, where they languish on average up to 248 days. Many spend years behind bars before ever seeing a judge.
In that sense, with judges friendly to the ruling power, the government could potentially run more efficiently, says Mr. González. But that’s not necessarily a democratic win either.
“The thing with democracies and the balance of powers is that it’s actually incredibly inefficient, but it protects people,” he says. “I think we’re about to see a lot of very efficient governance … but there’ll be very little oversight.”
Ms. Sheinbaum called the vote “an innovative process” the day after the election and added that “everything can be perfected.” She says the government will take lessons learned from this vote to implement in 2027, when the next batch of judicial positions will be up for election.
But Juan Pablo Campos, project manager at the German pro-democracy think tank Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Mexico City, worries about the long-term effect of politicized justice. “People weren’t elected for their technical capacity or professional competencies,” says Mr. Campos, whose organization has worked in Mexico since before its democratic transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “By eliminating the divisions of powers, the effect is in fact eliminating constitutional democracy. … Mexico is entering a new authoritarian phase.”
