Election of the Weekend II: Mexico
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It seems pretty clear at this point that Mexico is the major country in the world today where the “left populist” electoral formula has been highly successful. To say that Sheinbaum and Morena managed to fend off the anti-incumbent tendencies of 2024 would vastly understate the electoral achievement, which include clearing 60% and more than doubling up her nearest opponent, and increasing their governing majority in the Chamber of Deputies by almost 100 seats. Approval ratings suggest this is more than fear and loathing of the other parties; Sheinbaum has retained her ~80% approval rating almost a year into her term. With the unfortunate exception of Bukele in El Salvador, I doubt there is a more genuinely liked democratically elected national leader in the world today. I don’t have any sharp analysis or pithy lessons for aspiring left-populists elsewhere to derive from this movement, but informed speculation in that vein would be welcome in comments below.
Today’s elections in Mexico are part of the implementation of some constitutional reforms passed under Sheinbaum’s predecessor AMLO. In a major change to the judicial selection and retention process, thousands of judicial elections are being held across the country:
On Sunday, Mexicans will head to the polls to elect every federal judge in the nation and many local ones — 2,682 justices, judges and magistrates in all — a first-in-the-nation vote to overhaul the judiciary.
Morena leaders said they decided on the election to fix a justice system rife with corrupt judges who served the elite, rather than everyone, and who kept frustrating the party’s plans. In the process, they could eliminate the final major check on Morena’s power.
Many legal and political analysts in Mexico expect candidates aligned with Morena to dominate the election, filling judgeships from local courthouses to the Supreme Court and giving the party effective control over the third branch of government.
As a result, Mexicans face the paradox that giving more power to the public may undercut their democracy.
Predictions for Morena’s success on Sunday are driven by the unusual nature of the vote.
Just roughly 20 percent of voters are expected to cast ballots, the electoral authorities say, in part because voters hardly know the candidates. Polling shows Morena is overwhelmingly popular and the opposition is frail. The government controlled the selection process for federal candidates, who are elected by voters nationally, and 19 of 32 states will also elect local candidates.
Candidates are largely barred from traditional campaigning, a policy to try to level the playing field among candidates with different campaign funds. And political operatives have been accused of handing out cheat sheets, most of which recommend candidates with known ties to Morena.
“This is not an election — this is an appointment by the Morena government that’s going to be validated by a vote,” Carlos Heredia, a left-leaning political analyst, said this month. He previously advised Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former Mexican president who founded Morena and signed the overhaul in his final days in office last year.
Andrés García Repper, a former Morena lawyer who helped select candidates and is now one himself, disputed that the new judges would be beholden to the government. But he said vigilance will be important. “In no way is this a carte blanche,” he said this month. “We must demand a lot and point out each and every irregularity.”
President Claudia Sheinbaum has called the election the most democratic way to fix widespread problems in the courts like corruption and nepotism, saying that the vote takes the power to pick judges from government bureaucrats and gives it to the public. “Mexico will be a more democratic country on June 1,” she told reporters last week.
She has pointed out that she would have been able to appoint four Supreme Court justices during her six-year term. “We are giving up that right,” she told supporters this month. “Because we want the people to choose, because that’s what democracy is.”
There are several things going on here I tend to be suspicious of, in my ‘democratic theorist’ mode. One is the indulgence of the tendency to attempt the “let’s compromise between elections and not-elections” move at work here, which tends to suppress participation and ultimately elevate the power of 3rd party/independent “cheat-sheet” like tactics, which in a healthy, robust election are a normal, non-threatening part of the information landscape. The second is the wisdom of judicial elections in the first place.
That said, something I’ve occasionally noticed in comments is an elevation of “judicial elections are bad” from a rough rule of thumb to a strong principle. Something that’s mostly implicit in my book with Scott (silent auction still ongoing!) but I’m thinking about trying to write up more directly is that the democratic value of any particular flavor of democratic election is contingent on many factors. One thing that varies quite dramatically is the kind of outcome we should expect (regarding both level of corruption and level of partisan hackery) from whatever the elite selection process is. My thinking on this question has been informed by Miriam Siefter’s excellent recent article, “Countermajoritarian Legislatures,” which thinks about state-level democracy in an era of radical gerrymandering, to argue the facts about the latter should alter our thinking about the relative democratic value of executive, judicial, and other state-level elections. In at least one case, Wisconsin, not only are recent judicial elections of more democratic value than legislative elections, judicial democracy was also a necessary condition of making the restoration of legislative democracy possible. If everything in this paragraph seems utterly banal to you, I wouldn’t blame you; as stated I agree it seems like it is. But the elevation of skepticism about judicial elections, or initiative/referenda from a weak rule of thumb to a strong principle, or the continuing romanticization of legislative elections as the sin qua non of democratic politics, suggest that many people resist this basic contextual insight.
While it’s Morena’s staggeringly broad and seemingly lasting popularity that makes constitutional reform possible, it also seems like it might make this reform more dangerous, which is to say, a president and parliamentary majority with the kind of popularity. (While I’m generally dubious on making obviously partisan elections nominally non-partisan, this feature may cut against Morena’s advantage, but probably not enough to matter much.) An effective judiciary requires some degree of independence from the ruling legislative and executive factions, and democratic elections of judges are more likely to produce that result in a more divided and fluid polity. So this particular election may entrench Morena’s power in ways that may be concerning, even if Morena isn’t really doing anything shady. Which is to say: this election may be bad in all the general ways you already think judicial elections are bad! But I simply don’t know enough to be confident in that assessment.
This election is a good example of what I mean when I say please alert me to elections I should be covering! Any actual national election, executive, legislative or both, is going to be on my radar, but below that threshold I might easily miss something worth covering. I saw Mexican judicial on the master list of elections I use, but I was kind of ignoring it until I recently learned it’s a significant new thing. So, dear readers, please do reach out of there’s an election you’d like to see covered in this series. I can’t guarantee I’ll have time for a deeply researched post, but I’ll at minimum try to get something up. That’s the kind of service you get here for the fair price of “as much as you feel like paying” (see links below).