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June 11, 2021
Mexican president suffers setback in country's deadliest election in decades
Mexicans in the countryâs , widely seen as a referendum on his administrationâs self-proclaimed ââ of Mexico.
LĂłpez Obrador had hoped to secure the two-thirds congressional supermajority required to usher through uncontested. Instead, preliminary results indicate his Morena party will lose in Mexicoâs lower house of Congress. Morena currently holds but effectively controls because of its alliances, mainly with the Labor Party and the â which despite its name .
Morena holds , which werenât up for election this year.
This was the , both in voting population and candidacies. Some 94 million Mexicans cast ballots for . All 500 seats in the lower house of Congress were up for grabs, as were 15 governorships, 1,923 mayoralties and thousands of other local posts.
It was also Mexicoâs deadliest election in recent history.
According to the Etellekt consulting firm, since campaigning began last September. Hundreds more candidates were . Nearly 200 poll sites were shuttered in the states of because officials there said they could not guarantee the safety of voters.
A bloody race
The main opposition that dented Morenaâs dominance was a of Mexicoâs : the center-right Revolutionary Institutional Party, right-wing National Action Party and leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution. The Citizenâs Movement, a social-democratic party, .
Morena and is leading in 10 of 15 gubernatorial races. But it suffered in Mexico City, .
LĂłpez Obrador , after promising to put ââ and , which consistently has among the worldâs highest murder rates.
Instead, he has overseen rising poverty and the most violent period of Mexican history, with .
Mexicoâs crime wave began well before the LĂłpez Obrador administration, with President Felipe Calderonâs 2006 declaration of a ââ that got .
Rather than follow through on his creative campaign pledges to reduce violence, LĂłpez Obrador has , expanding the militaryâs involvement in law enforcement despite its .
Most electoral violence seen during the midterm election season occurred in the cartel-dominated Mexican states of . There, criminal groups often offer local public servants and candidates the infamous choice of â,â which translates to âplata o plomo.â In other words, take a bribe or get shot.
against politicians or candidates this election season were against local officials. Municipal leaders are appealing targets because criminal groups can intimidate lower-level officials into handing over parts of municipal budgets or calling off local police.
Campaigning at press conferences
Out of 89 murdered politicians, . Even so, LĂłpez Obrador dismisses reports on Mexicoâs electoral violence as .
In his June 2 daily press conference, Mexicans âdo not live in a perfect societyâ but claimed âpeace and tranquilityâ reign.
The presidentâs morning press conferences, which can last for up to three hours, frequently include diatribes against the reporters asking him questions, attacks on and accusations against . He also uses press conferences to attack .
The and prohibit public officials from using the government machinery to promote themselves or their political allies during elections.
After Mexicoâs National Electoral Institute told the president at press conferences, he said the . He successfully it before the .
Such moves have polarized the Mexican electorate.
LĂłpez Obrador maintains the support of of Mexicans, who crave the promised âtransformationâ of their long-struggling nation. But many civil society leaders and intellectuals in the presidentâs combative rhetoric and policy agenda.
Since 2018, Morena and approved . Many have and .
Critics say LĂłpez Obrador is creating a government grounded on his , without traditional checks and balances, and weakening Mexicoâs democratic institutions.
They cite, for example, a court reform billed as that unexpectedly and controversially Arturo ZaldĂvar, a vocal LĂłpez Obrador ally.
Critics claim this maneuver and .
Other Morena legislation raises privacy concerns. A passed this year requires cellphone companies to gather usersâ identification and biometric data, like eye scans, and turn it over to the government.
Simultaneously, Morena has , a government watchdog that .
[Understand whatâs going on in Washington. .]
The president also threatened to after it rebuked him for electioneering at his morning press conferences.
âTo hell with their institutionsâ
In 2006, LĂłpez Obrador ran for president and lost by 0.56 percentage points to . He cried fraud and contested the result.
â!â he said after .
It was LĂłpez Obradorâs first of two failed presidential runs.
Now, heâs president. But LĂłpez Obrador still seems convinced that the institutions of Mexican democracy â its independent judiciary, its election watchdogs, its budget monitors â are against him.
Mexican voters had the option to strengthen LĂłpez Obradorâs grasp on power. But they used the midterms to maintain democratic constraints on the presidency, checking an ambitious presidentâs legislative agenda.
This article has been corrected to more accurately characterize the ideological positioning of Mexicoâs mainstream political parties.
, Senior Lecturer in Human Rights, Constitutional Law and Legal Theory,
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