Politicising the judiciary: Mexico's radical reform

Mexico has just lost its democracy, said Pablo Hiriart in El Financiero (Mexico City). In what must be a world first, it has decided that all of Mexico's 7,000 judges should be elected. It was all done constitutionally: thanks to the landslide victory of his Left-populist Morena party in the June elections, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (a.k.a. AMLO) was able to secure the required two-thirds majority in the senate for this overhaul, though the senators had to hold the final vote in a different building to escape the rage of protesters who'd stormed into the chamber shouting, "The judiciary will not fall!"

Their rage was justified. AMLO has swept aside the objections of the opposition, legal scholars, and the US government, who all maintain that this authoritarian move will eliminate judicial independence and destroy the system of checks and balances our democracy depends on. This isn't the "will of the people". It's a "coup d'état" that puts all three branches of government in the hands of the ruling party.

The right-wing opposition is actually "attacking the democracy it claims to defend", said Juan Becerra Acosta in La Jornada (Mexico City). This overhaul is the only way to eliminate the corruption in our courts and confront a supreme court that has blocked AMLO's security and energy agenda. There's no denying our courts are run by a "clique of corrupt judges" who do the bidding of Mexico's rich, said Antonio Salgado Borge in Proceso (Mexico City). But to claim this reform will "cleanse the judicial system of corruption" is nonsense. Electing judges takes control of the judiciary out of the hands of the economic elites who've dominated Mexico for decades only to deliver it to the political elites in the Morena party. Still, at least we'll now "have a state capable of limiting the influence of big capital".

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But it's not just the rich who'll suffer from this, the rest of us will suffer, too, said Marco A. Mares in El Economista (Mexico City). It will destroy confidence in our political and financial stability, we'll see a plummeting peso, less investment, and credit downgrades for the government and state oil company. And it will hurt trade relations with the US and Canada, just as we were poised to reap the benefits of deeper regional trade.

Choosing judges based not on their qualifications but on their political patrons is always a bad idea, said El Mundo (Madrid), but it's especially disturbing in a country "so penetrated by corruption and drug trafficking". Mexico may turn into a "dangerous bastion of instability in America's backyard"