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Mexico’s ruling coalition on Friday voted to change the constitution to stop the courts from reviewing legislation passed by Congress, brushing aside concerns from investors and rights advocates about the rule of law.
In the early hours of Friday morning, senators from the Morena party and its allies approved changes that would remove the Supreme Court’s ability to review legal challenges filed against changes to the constitution.
Legal analysts said the move would give the legislature supremacy over the judiciary, altering the fragile system of separation of powers built up over Mexico’s transition to democracy in the past three decades.
“[It] underlines existing concerns over the accelerated concentration of power under President Claudia Sheinbaum,” said Nicholas Watson of political risk firm Teneo.
Since the leftwing Sheinbaum swept to power with a congressional supermajority in June elections, the Mexican peso has depreciated some 15 per cent against the dollar over fears about reforms that would overhaul institutions.
Sheinbaum and her supporters reject concerns about democracy and say the country’s democratic period has marked by deep inequality and corruption. They say that most people agree the justice system was broken anyway.
“The leaders of the conservative block and media say, ‘the president is an authoritarian’ and that ‘democracy is finished’. But the government’s biggest critic is here with us freely asking a question,” she said in her morning news conference on Friday. “What authoritarianism?”
Sheinbaum’s predecessor as president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office this month, regularly clashed with the judiciary after it suspended several of his flagship initiatives, such as greater state control of the energy sector.
In response, he devised a plan to fire all the nation’s judges and replace them via elections, in an overhaul supported by Sheinbaum.
The changes approved on Friday will escalate an already tense stand-off between the ruling party and the judiciary. They will now pass to the lower house for approval, but that is broadly expected to happen quickly, with the Morena-led alliance holding an even larger majority than it does in the senate.
Mexico’s legal community has been in turmoil since the policy to elect judges was approved, and lawyers had been debating whether or not the Supreme Court could prevent its implementation. Friday’s changes, if realised, mean they will not be able to.
“Its clearly a tightening of the screws,” said Saúl López, a professor at the Tec de Monterrey university. “The logic of this is strengthening the majority organs and doing away with any kind of limitation.”