Americans may feel inundated with political news these days, what with an election pending in little more than a month. And according to all the right people, the vote is between sweetness and joy or thuggery and fascism: what a choice! But elections happen everywhere, and they’re just as monumental to expats as to citizens. Let me explain.
Mexico had an election back in June, and the ruling Morena party won an overwhelming victory. The party leader and current Presidente, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (hereafter by his nickname, AMLO), is limited to a single term, so he was not on the ballot. But he is immensely popular, especially among the poor, and they rewarded his party (Morena) with absolute control over the Congress and elected AMLO’s hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, as Presidente. The new Congress is in session (under AMLO), but Sheinbaum takes office in October.
AMLO describes his term in office as part of Mexico’s fourth transformation, directly calling to mind the enormous changes involved in events such as the War of Independence and the Revolution. He has made sweeping changes in the country, reinforcing his popularity with the masses. Still, some of his proposals were stopped by the independent Mexican judiciary branch, especially the Mexican Supreme Court. For his final month in office, with a Congressional super-majority, AMLO has initiated changes to the Mexican Constitution that were earlier thwarted by the courts. And this includes making all judges (even the Supreme Court) stand for partisan election (before they were appointed after passing a series of qualification checks).
There are critics–foreign and domestic–of the current Mexican judicial system. Conviction rates are low and many complain of favoritism to the wealthy. AMLO contends voting will make the justices responsive to the people: real democracy brought to the halls of justice. Critics claim judges will become beholden to political parties and no longer represent a check-and-balance on the system. Such was the case when Mexico was a one party state under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, from 1929-2000.
There are foreign examples to draw upon. In 2017, Bolivia adopted a similar democratic approach to judicial offices, with disastrous results. Qualified candidates have withdrawn, party-hack justices have interpreted the constitution as the sitting leadership requests, and voters routinely leave the judicial ballots blank, expressing no confidence in the candidates. On the other hand, as AMLO notes, America often votes for its state and local judges. The American example is particularly interesting. While almost half of the states elect justices, no one suggests the system is better than appointments, and it incurs all the problems of campaigning, fund-raising, and partisanship. Imagine someone campaigning on the promise to indict a former President! Nevermind.
The Biden administration has been especially tough on AMLO’s judicial reforms. They have pointedly criticized them, suggested they are authoritarian, and threatened to challenge them under the tripartite USMCA trade agreement, which is due for review shortly. The Presidente has not taken this criticism lightly, calling it “interventionist” and “disrespectful” and freezing his relationship with the US Ambassador. However you look at this situation, the irony abounds: the party of democracy in the United States, which is considering stacking the US Supreme Court unless it changes its way, is criticizing a more-democratic approach to appointing Mexican Supreme Court justices, devised by a party with unheard of domestic popularity, in order to get that body to change its ways. Ain’t democracy grand?
Now for expats, the consequences are many. In the near term, no one knows how judicial reform will play out, which has international finance and business on alert: business needs predictability, and elected judges don’t provide that, in general. All the business moving to Mexico under the concept of friend- or near-shoring is dependent upon Mexico being a stable place to do business. Is that still the case? Will it continue to be? That uncertainty took the Mexican Peso from almost sixteen to the dollar about six months ago to almost 20 to the dollar, now hovering around 19 to one dollar. There will be downward pressure on the Peso until it is clear how judicial reform will play out in reality under Presidente Sheinbaum.
In the longer term, Mexico is indeed amidst a significant transformation. While those NOB may still think of Mexico as a poor, crime-ridden place, it has the twelfth largest Gross Domestic Product in the world, larger than Spain and tied with Australia and South Korea. It’s number seven in world tourism, seventh in auto production (close behind Germany), and fourth in beer production. Mexico is twenty-fifth in the World Happiness Index, but Mexican society remains unequal (twelfth worst in economic inequality). AMLO came to office promising change, especially for the poorest, and delivered on much of that agenda. Whether the Morena party can continue to fund those initiatives and consolidate its gains while avoiding sliding into the stagnant authoritarianism which beset the PRI is the unanswered question.
On both sides of the border, people make dire projections of the catastrophe about to engulf us. Some do so to get your attention: nobody ever clicked through a link with the title “the world isn’t ending today.” Some people want to believe it’s true, because we live in the most interesting times EVER. Some are just trolls. The word mundane, which has come to be synonymous with boring, originally meant “of the earthly (real) world, as opposed to the heavenly one.” In both meanings, most of what happens in today’s politics is, in fact, mundane.