(Bloomberg) — Mexico’s opposition failed to stop Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Morena Party from retaining the presidency and making huge gains in elections earlier this month. Now the battered and shaky coalition faces an even bigger challenge: how to prevent him from passing his controversial series of sweeping constitutional reforms before he leaves office?
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AMLO, as Mexico’s leader is known, and president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum have signaled plans to use the huge majorities Morena won in Congress to advance a long-awaited overhaul of the country’s judiciary once lawmakers take office in September.
This possibility has roiled markets and sent the peso tumbling, a turmoil exacerbated by fears that the opposition, which has occasionally weakened AMLO’s efforts during his six-year presidency, will prove unable to push his agenda into the future. again in the last month of his term of office. or once Sheinbaum takes office on October 1.
It is a Herculean task for the parties that long dominated Mexican politics but have steadily lost ground to Morena since 2018. The series of constitutional reforms has raised concerns about the erosion of checks and balances and Mexican democracy itself. a severe blow to the ability of the anti-Morena forces to recover.
“What is most worrying for the opposition is that this landscape is likely to give Morena the opportunity to change the rules of the game on a number of fronts, including the electoral authority and the judiciary,” said Gustavo Flores-Macias, a healthcare professor . government and public policy at Cornell University. That would have “important consequences for the opposition’s ability to regain ground.”
AMLO’s status as one of the world’s most popular leaders prompted the PRI, which controlled Mexico for nearly a century, to join forces with PAN and the PRD, two parties that had traditionally opposed it. What started as an effort to reduce the governing coalition’s majority in the 2021 midterm elections focused this year on defeating Sheinbaum and preventing Morena from amassing even more power at every level of government.
The results were disastrous. Sheinbaum defeated opposition candidate Xochitl Galvez by more than 30 points in the presidential race. Morena won Mexico City and six of the eight governorships at stake. The coalition also won a supermajority in the lower house of Congress and fell just three seats short of achieving the same in the Senate.
That has meant AMLO only has to negotiate with a few senators to win the votes needed to pass reforms that require two-thirds support in each chamber. The most controversial proposal would require that all judges, including those of the Supreme Court, be elected by popular vote. Another would replace the federal elections office with a new body whose members would also be chosen by voters.
But while he and Sheinbaum continue to make progress, the opposition remains largely stuck in the same identity crisis that kept it from taking off.
“The structure, proposals and alliances are based on opposition to AMLO, and that was a mistake,” said Carlos Perez Ricart, assistant professor of international relations at the Center for Research and Education in Economics in Mexico City. “Now they are orphans of enemies, orphans of everything.”
Days before the June 2 vote, PRI leader Alejandro Moreno called reporters to party headquarters, where he ran through a slideshow of data he claimed showed Galvez still had a chance of winning the election, despite polls showing that Sheinbaum had a double-digit lead. .
Since then, the opposition has shown a similar refusal to take the results into account. Galvez spent the immediate aftermath promising to request a recount before abandoning the plan, and continued to argue that AMLO was exerting undue influence on the race. The heads of PRI and PAN have refused to resign and have also questioned the results.
Ultimately, opposition parties will have to craft an agenda that can make the case that Galvez could not make: that a turn away from Morena is not just a return to the past they represent, and that Mexicans have resolutely rejected the past two presidential elections. to vote.
“I find it difficult to think that there is a good agenda for the opposition as a whole, other than simply opposing Morena’s government for the sake of opposing it,” said Matias Gomez Leautaud, an analyst for the Eurasia Group.
But in the short term, its relevance may depend on AMLO’s ability to fend off AMLO’s attempts to steal the votes he needs to finally get his reforms through the Senate.
“From the start, the opposition must show itself united,” said Jorge Buendia, head of the Buendia & Marquez polling agency. “It needs to build a reputation that it is in fact a dam and can hinder constitutional reform.”
“If the opposition supports Morena’s proposals from the first moment,” he added, “it will be more difficult to be credible in the future.”
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