A series of reforms by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrado meant to reduce the power of the Instituto Nacional Electoral and loosen elections rules has met more opposition than previous actions that drew accusations of autocracy
As a young social-justice activist in the Mexico of the 1970s and 1980s, Uuc-kib Espadas Ancona knew he had little chance of making change through the electoral system. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which governed the country for 71 consecutive years, controlled the election machinery and ensured its candidates won every time. When he protested the flagrantly rigged presidential election of 1988, police violently shut down the demonstrations.
“It’s an authoritarian tendency,” he said at INE’s headquarters, a complex of grey and pink stucco buildings at the junction of two expressways in the Mexico City suburbs. “The objective is to make INE a weak institution.” Jorge Alvarez Maynez, a legislator with the opposition Movimiento Ciudadano, says Mr. Lopez Obrador usually bats away concerns over the country’s democratic institutions as first-world problems of little day-to-day importance. With INE, however, Mr. Alvarez said, there was a much stronger response from regular citizens.
Several of Mr. Lopez Obrador’s political allies have run afoul of these rules, including one state gubernatorial candidate who was kicked out of the race for failing to file financial paperwork. The opposition has lodged complaints against Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, a protégé of the President, for holding campaign-style events around the country ahead of next year’s presidential race.
Fernando Belaunzaran Mendez, who helped organize the protests, contends that Mr. Lopez Obrador’s progressive image is little more than patina. The President has imposed fiscal austerity on the government, failed to deliver on his promise of universal health care and made virtually no effort to advance access to abortion.
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