Mexico fulfilled a long-held populist fantasy Sunday, as the polls opened for the first-ever election of the Mexican judiciary. Every judge in the country, from local district judges to the judges of the Mexican Supreme Court, will, over the course of the next few years, become a member of a popularly-elected body—a feature which will make Mexico unique not only among Latin American countries but worldwide.
The massive political reorganization is the brainchild of former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose initiatives were continually frustrated by the judiciary in general and the Supreme Court of Mexico in particular. In 2023 alone, the Supreme Court blocked four of López Obrador’s major political projects: his attempt to place the National Guard under the authority of the Secretariat of National Defense; his presidential decree classifying major public works projects as “matters of national security”; his effort to strip down and restructure the National Electoral Institute (a body he alleged was corrupt and illegally interfered with elections to harm him and his allies in the political party Morena); and his decree which would have stripped the judiciary of a set of funds that existed to provide pensions, continuing education, healthcare, and other benefits.
Frustrated with the intransigence of the court, and perhaps even more so with the betrayal of two of his appointees to that august body—America’s Republican Party is not the only institution plagued by Supreme Court justices suddenly changing their political perspectives—López Obrador settled on one method to eliminate judicial obstacles once and for all: remove the insulation of the mechanisms of appointment and approval which separate judges from the regular political life of the nation, and make them into politicians.
This judicial reform constituted the centerpiece of a collection of 20 constitutional amendments López Obrador presented, crowning his final year as president in 2024, and very nearly causing a constitutional crisis. The canny populist president exhausted every effort and stratagem available to him to ram the amendment’s passage through the legislature despite massive opposition from domestic political opponents, international observers, non-governmental organizations, and, most of all, the judiciary itself.
When voting in the Chamber of Deputies proved that López Obrador’s hold over his own party, Morena, was unshakeable, the opposition hoped to bring things to a decisive end in the Senate, where Morena and allies could muster only 85 of the 86 votes required to achieve the constitutionally mandated supermajority necessary for the passage of a constitutional amendment. That hope was dashed in a dramatic fashion, when Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, a senator from the opposing National Action Party (PAN) with a long history of clashing harshly with the president, disappeared the night before the vote only to show up and dramatically, amid accusations of corruption and roars of betrayal, cast the deciding ballot—in support of the amendment.
Weeks of strikes by judges and court employees were of no avail, and the last hopes of López Obrador’s enemies were dashed when the Supreme Court declined to strike the amendment down, an action that would have precipitated a direct confrontation between the judiciary and the other branches of the Mexican federal government.
Now, the results of the elections leave little doubt that López Obrador’s ambitions have been realized and that the judiciary has largely ended as a potential check on Morena’s power. Claudia Sheinbaum, the current president and López Obrador’s chosen successor, has strenuously defended and promoted the judicial reform, and for good reason: The elections were likely determined almost entirely by Morena’s political arm, which operated a major “get out the vote” campaign among the party faithful and churned out voting guides by the millions to aid their partisans in selecting their favored candidates.
Even with Sheinbaum’s support, turnout in the election was low—only 13 percent of the Mexican electorate showed up at the ballot box. That low figure can in part be attributed to a boycott by the opposition, which maintains that the reform is illegitimate. But the reform was still broadly popular among Mexicans, with some 70 percent supporting the amendment. Most of the low turnout was due to the difficulties inherent to the election itself. Candidates for judgeships had little time or resources available to campaign, and little information (apart from the voters’ guides produced by Morena) was available to voters to distinguish one candidate from another—a recurring problem in nonpartisan judicial elections, even in the U.S. The sheer number of votes to cast was also intimidating: voters received anywhere from 6 to 15 separate ballots, which could take around 20 minutes to fill out. Many voters gave up and left large sections of the ballot blank after being confronted with lists of names they were unfamiliar with for positions they did not understand.
While the results have not been officially ratified by the National Electoral Institute, the outcome of the election is clear: Judges supported by Morena dominated the polls. The three faithful Supreme Court justices appointed by López Obrador were reelected to their high offices, and the new Chief Justice served as a functionary in the former president’s government, promoting his engagement with the indigenous people of Mexico. Sheinbaum will face none of the judicial resistance to her initiatives that so aggravated López Obrador.
Domestic and international observers have condemned the new system, arguing that judicial elections are more likely to be subject to corruption and control by organized crime. Low-turnout elections can easily be manipulated by cartels with the resources to intimidate unfriendly voters and buy support for their favored candidates. The National Electoral Institute promises to investigate irregular elections and a new judicial body responsible for regulating and disciplining elected judges is intended to respond to any issues internally, but it is unclear how effective such measures will be. Many others have argued that such elections destroy judicial independence, which is obviously correct and indeed the entire purpose of the reform.
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With control over the judiciary firmly secured, Morena now has complete domination of the entire political system. All three branches of government lie firmly within its grasp. The party in many ways increasingly resembles the PRI of the 20th century, which ruled the country as the “institutional party of government” for nearly a century without interruption. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Single-party rule is a powerful equilibrium point in Mexican politics; the deep entwinement of the state in politics, society, and industry naturally tends to create a kind of political monopsony that responds to popular pressure by shifting the ideological positions within the ruling party rather than replacing it with another party.
Sheinbaum has already shown signs of conforming to this pattern, subtly dropping López Obrador’s approach to organized crime while leveraging Morena’s institutional power to make significant reforms to increase Mexican state capacity. Her overwhelming popularity is proof that judicial independence is a secondary consideration for Mexican citizens who simply wish to see a competent government that respects their attitudes and opinions.
The risk inherent in such a system is that Morena becomes, like the PRI, complacent and corrupt—or, rather, more corrupt, compared even to the average Mexican political party today (corruption remains endemic in the country). The “perfect dictatorship” of the 20th century PRI routinely falsified elections to maintain its hold on power. However, it seems unlikely that this will be the case for Morena. The modern Mexican populace has significantly increased its standards of political conduct, and is unlikely to suffer a return of such a dysfunctional system. If Morena fails to deliver the goods, it will no more be able to maintain its hold on the system it has created than the PRI was 30 years ago.
