AMLO’s electoral reform reverses gains made by left struggle
Photos used under a creative commons license, photo editing by Ojalá.
Opinion • Ramón I. Centeno • April 20, 2023 • Leer en castellano
The political project currently governing Mexico is very far from the left and very close to militarism.
The creation of the National Guard in 2019, it was approved unanimously by senators from all parties, legalizing the militarization of public security. As part of the opposition, Andrés Manuel López Obrador was critical of militarization. Today, he is its most vocal proponent, backed by the opposition.
Instead, the issue that has caused an outcry in Mexico’s party system is the electoral reform proposed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. They know it would be suicide to let AMLO move forward on this issue.
López Obrador's proposal for the National Electoral Institute (INE) is concerning to the other parties because it threatens to undermine their ambitions to return to power. The counter-reform reduces the quality and credibility of elections and removes obstacles for the ruling party to influence voters.
The protests convened by opposition parties against this reform are not based on the defense of democracy, rather, they’re a product of their survival instinct. Their lives and futures depend on preserving a minimally decent electoral system. In this regard, they are not wrong.
During the long era of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule, elections were a mere formality: if the result was unfavorable to the party in power, a different outcome from the one at the polls was announced.
Generations of Mexicans grew accustomed to electoral fraud. Instead, the most important mechanism for governmental change was the "dedazo," in reference to the handpicking (literally, finger pointing) of the next President by the sitting one.
Despite all the criticism leftists can make of Mexico’s electoral system, voting now takes place throughout the entire country, ballots are properly counted and results are reliably announced. It is a simple system, which was made possible through decades of popular struggles.
Democracy in Mexico, product of left struggle
Bourgeois democracy, as Marxists referred to it, is far from beautiful.
A bourgeois democracy in Germany killed Rosa Luxemburg. A bourgeois democracy established in the United States legalized slavery. A bourgeois democracy in South Africa segregated Black people through apartheid. A bourgeois democracy in Israel maintains to this day a system over the Palestinian people that’s militarized apartheid. A bourgeois democracy in Mexico disappeared 43 students from Ayotzinapa and upholds impunity for this state crime.
At the same time, relatively clean, free and competitive elections have often been the product of fierce struggles. So it was in Mexico, where the left was long at the center of the struggle against electoral fraud.
The democratization of the regime began with the 1977 "political reform," which allowed minority parties, especially the Mexican Communist Party, access to parliamentary representation.
That decade was marked by the fresh wounds of the 1968 (Tlatelolco) and 1971 (Corpus Christi) massacres. State repression radicalized young people, driving many to join the guerrilla. To maintain control, the regime was forced to implement policies beyond violence.
In 1978, the regime granted amnesty to members of urban and rural guerrillas, such as the September 23 Communist League and the Poor People’s Party. From then until 1988, Mexico would see socialist legislators elected not only from the Stalinist Communist Party, but even from the Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary party.
However, 1988 was also the year in which the PRI saw the splintering of its Cardenist wing, which would give rise to the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), the direct precursor to the Morena Party. The bulk of the Marxist left regarded this rupture as prophetic and concluded that they should merge with the PRD and support its presidential candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. They believed that this would be a bridge to socialism, and that communists would be occupy leadership positions under the new model due to their theoretical superiority.
But as the popular saying goes: "they went out seeking wool and came back shorn." Mexico has yet to recover from the suicide of the left, and to this day there is a vacuum on the left of the political spectrum. Today the challenge for the left is to start over.
The 1988 election was marked by electoral fraud. The regime imposed the victory of Carlos Salinas. Even so, it was unable to silence increasingly loud demands for clean elections.
The end of this long process can be dated to 1996, when another electoral reform put an end to presidential control of elections. That year, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) became autonomous. Previously, the IFE was under the direction of the Home Affairs Secretariat, itself directed by the Presidency.
The 1996 reform cannot be understood without the left, specifically without the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994. It was a direct response to the threat Zapatismo posed to the legitimacy of the regime, under Salinas, who tried to cultivate a global reputation as a modern and democratic ruler.
To keep the crisis created by Indigenous insurrection from escalating, Salinas convinced the National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD to close ranks with the PRI by promising quicker progress in democratization.
On January 27, 1994, the three parties agreed to the "20 Commitments for Democracy." "Achieve the impartiality of the electoral bodies" was the first point of the agreement. For the PAN and the PRD, the Zapatista insurrection was heaven-sent, although they never acknowledged their debt to the movement. Instead, they took advantage of the Zapatista struggle, to which they never did justice.
Nevertheless, it was a step forward: Mexico became a bourgeois democracy. In 1997, after the first clean election, the PRI lost its legislative majority. Three years later, in 2000, the PRI would finally lose the Presidency.
López Obrador, who was then president of the PRD, was one of the main advocates for and beneficiaries of the 1996 electoral reform. Because of that reform, he was able to secure the governorship of Mexico City in 2000 and control of the federal government in 2018. The IFE, which is now the INE (National Electoral Institute), was the ladder that allowed him to climb to the top.
Now, it seems AMLO wants to burn the INE so that no one else can follow his rise.
The temptations of power
At first glance it might appear to be a soft reform, but it’s much more than that. It weakens and whittles down the National Electoral Institute and softens sanctions against public officials and political parties who commit electoral crimes. Dubbed "Plan B", this reform is less ambitious than the original plan to reform the Constitution. But it points in the same anti-democratic direction.
The weakening (budget-wise) and shrinking (with massive layoffs) of the INE is central. State propaganda has been referring to salaries of officials within the INA as being higher than those of the president.
In this matter, the former president of the General Council of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, didn't help at all, fighting the reduction of his salary. In addition to being the personification of a classist and pedantic criollo, he was clumsy: he could have just accepted a salary cut and moved on.
By refusing to do so, Córdova helped AMLO, who was able to proceed with plans that in fact have little or nothing to do with the salaries of top electoral officials.
In reality, the counter-reform subjects the INE to the same "republican austerity" as Mexico’s other institutions: in the rest of the world, these policies are simply called neoliberal austerity.
Cutbacks and layoffs have allowed AMLO to weaken several institutions and undermine their work. And knowing obradorism, we ought to be worried that at some point, faced with the inability of the INE to do its job to the same standards, the idea of asking the army to "collaborate" on electoral tasks could be raised.
The spirit of this counter-reform is so reckless that its future is uncertain. The Supreme Court has already suspended its application in order to discuss its unconstitutionality, which could lead to its total annulment. The controversy among political elites is simple, and it has nothing to do with AMLO's (absent) leftism. Rather, it’s connected to his desire for power.
López Obrador clearly wishes to go down in history. In order to do so, he needs to write it. History is written by the victors. Why should elections get in the way of history?
Speaking of history, the left, or what is left of it, would be wise to remember its own lessons.
When authoritarianism advances, it's the working classes who face harsher conditions as they fight for their rights.. The left existed and should exist to defend liberties. The INE—although in a distorted form—is a victory of the left.
The right-wing opposition says that the INE should not be touched. The left could emphasize that it should be improved. It is important to simplify the registration of independent candidacies, a process currently riddled with requirements that need to be filled in very little time. Under these conditions, only privileged sectors are able to register as independents. In 2018 this situation prevented María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy), who was backed by the EZLN and the National Indigenous Congress, from making it onto the ballot.
The other right wing, Morena, is not improving the INE. It is suffocating it.
What is at stake is the issue of who is defending democracy. And we already know what happens when we leave that task in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Ramón I. Centeno is a professor at the University of Sonora and has participated in the socialist movement since he was a highschooler in Mexico City.
