The assault on democracy – El Financiero

Mexican democracy lives in a situation of risk. The assault on democracy that the president wants to make puts us in a dangerous situation to continue not only with the democracy that we have built for several decades, but even with maintaining the current freedoms that we enjoy.

The search to control the INE and now determine the rules of the democratic game that until today have been given by consensus to its unique and personal interests, locate the magnitude of the objectives set by the National Palace to destroy Mexican democracy, build a personal, autocratic and clearly undemocratic power. Without any resentment, the president seeks to violate the Constitution only with the sole “argument” of lowering the cost of democracy, and without his narrative going any further. There is not an iota of agreeing on any article or any of the next advisers of the INE, it is only the stark search to maintain power by any means, even if it entails violating the Constitution.

The president, like many 20th-century interwar tyrants and current populists, rose to power through the rules of liberal democracy, but only to destroy it from within upon arrival. There are already many examples of the strategy that has made this evident, the eager search for individual control of the other powers of the State, either under threat to make the ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation resign, or members of other autonomous bodies of the Mexican State, but even if that will not be enough in the last weeks after his defeat in the search to impose another or another president in the Court, he has dedicated himself to attacking for no reason and in a very vulgar way to insult the current minister president without any argument, looking for which vile despot to show his displeasure for the lack of control of a state power.

The drop in votes that Morena (the president’s party instrument) had in 2021 put them in a situation, like their acolytes and remoras (Green and Labor Party), of not having a qualified majority in the Chamber of Deputies and that was the reason why the constitutional reforms proposed to modify the INE and the electoral rules did NOT pass, but that did not prevent the president from seeking , knowing that they are essentially unconstitutional, a famous “plan b”, like this with small letters, because from the beginning the parliamentary norm for the presentation of initiatives and their opinion in commissions was violated before being presented to the plenary session, skipping all of this and taking them to a vote in plenary for their approval by simple majority, something that the Court in the face of the unconstitutionality appeals that have already been filed or will continue and the constitutional controversy that the INE has filed will undoubtedly have to be taken into consideration. What starts badly ends badly. The court has not only the constitutional responsibility of ensuring adherence to the Constitution of the reforms approved by Congress, but also taking into consideration that it is not only the letter but also the spirit and interpretation of our Constitution, and more when than expected. we are talking about is not only a system of government (democracy), but a system of life that is how the Constitution itself defines it in the third article, in addition to the massive and multiple forms of demonstration in favor of it and respect to the Constitution, which Mexican society has made explicit in recent months.

Wanting to assault democracy to install personal power or a neo-caudillismolike that of Plutarco Elías Calles in the years after Obregon’s assassination, is to ignore not only history and its context, but also the world and current Mexican society, Marx said well regarding Luis Bonaparte after his coup in the France in the mid-nineteenth century, that “history occurs twice: the first is presented as a great tragedy and the second as a miserable farce”, is the case, and the Court has before it the privilege and responsibility of defending our Constitution, our democracy and at the same time put in the dustbin of history the populists who claim to be in the 21st century the tyrants that history has discarded.

The broad and massive social rejection of the presidential claim to assault democracy to establish personal power must be both the force that nourishes full support for the independence of the judiciary and the sap that feeds the democratic struggle in the face of the electoral processes of 2024, whose sole central objective is to redirect the democratic path to have a Mexico of freedoms, respect for the rule of law and the search for a more egalitarian country.