Tens of hundreds of individuals filled Mexico City’s vast fundamental plaza Sunday to protest President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s electoral law changes they are saying threaten democracy and will mark a return to the past.
The plaza is generally thought to carry nearly 100,000 people, but many protesters who couldn’t fit within the square spilled onto nearby streets.
The marchers were clad mostly in white and pink — the colour of the National Electoral Institute — and shouted slogans like “Don’t Touch my Vote!” Like the same but somewhat larger march on Nov. 13, the marchers appeared somewhat more affluent than those at the typical demonstration.
The electoral law changes drew attention from the U.S. government.
Brian A. Nichols, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs, wrote in his Twitter account that “Today, in Mexico, we see an amazing debate on electoral reforms which might be testing the independence of electoral and judicial institutions.”
“The US supports independent, well-resourced electoral institutions that strengthen democratic processes and the rule of law,” Nichols wrote.
López Obrador’s proposals were passed last week. Once enacted, they might cut salaries, funding for local election offices and training for residents who operate and oversee polling stations. They might also reduce sanctions for candidates who fail to report campaign spending.
Mexico’s president denies the reforms are a threat to democracy and says criticism is elitist, arguing the institute spends an excessive amount of money. He says the funds must be spent on the poor.
But protester Enrique Bastien, a 64-year-old veterinarian, said that with the reforms López Obrador “desires to return to the past” when “the federal government controlled elections.”
“It was a life with no independence,” said Bastien, recalling the Nineteen Seventies and 80s when the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ruled Mexico with fraud and handouts.
Fernando Gutierrez, 55, a small businessman, said López Obrador wanted to guide Mexico to a socialist government. “That’s obvious, from the help going to Cuba,” Gutierrez said.
López Obrador has imported coronavirus vaccines, medical employees and stone railway ballast from Cuba, but has shown little taste for socialist policies at home.
Many other demonstrators were simply wary of the type of vote miscounting, campaign overspending and electoral pressure tactics that were common in Mexico before the independent electoral agency was created within the Nineties.
López Obrador said Thursday he’ll sign the changes into law, though he expects court challenges. Many at Sunday’s protest expressed hope that Mexico’s Supreme Court would overturn a number of the changes, as courts have done with other presidential initiatives.
Lorenzo Cordova, the top of the National Electoral Institute, has said the reforms “seek to chop hundreds of people that work day-after-day to ensure trustworthy elections, something that can in fact pose a risk for future elections.”
López Obrador has appeared nonchalant about court challenges, saying Thursday that he believed the changes can be upheld because none was “outside the law.”
Nonetheless, prior to now he has ceaselessly attacked Mexico’s judiciary and claimed judges are a part of a conservative conspiracy against his administration.
The president’s strident pushback against the judiciary, in addition to regulatory and oversight agencies, has raised fears amongst some that he’s looking for to reinstitute the practices of the old PRI, which bent the principles to retain Mexico’s presidency for 70 years until its defeat within the 2000 elections.
Elections in Mexico are expensive by international standards, partially because just about all legal campaign financing is, by law, supplied by the federal government. The electoral institute also issues the secure voter ID cards which might be essentially the most commonly accepted type of identification in Mexico, and oversees balloting within the distant and infrequently dangerous corners of the country.
López Obrador stays highly popular in Mexico, with approval rankings of around 60%. While he cannot run for reelection, his Morena party is favored in next yr’s national elections and the opposition is in disarray.
A part of his popular appeal comes from railing against high-paid government bureaucrats, and he has been angered by the indisputable fact that some top electoral officials are paid greater than the president.
