On Sunday, Mexico amended its constitution to incorporate a controversial reform that will make around 1,600 federal judicial posts elected offices—including those on the Supreme Court of Justice. The reform is a signature proposal of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, and President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who won in a landslide in June. Mexico will now become one of only two countries to subject its national judiciary to elections. Predictably, both the Mexican opposition and the international media have cried foul.
Critics contend that the Mexican president is using his party’s overwhelming mandate to consolidate power and, in effect, resuscitate the single-party autocracy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled from 1930 to 2000. They also claim that AMLO is deploying the same playbook used by other popular left-wing leaders in the region, like the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, to crush the political opposition.
But the conduct of López Obrador and Morena differs markedly from those of the PRI regime, Venezuelan Chavismo, or other Latin American authoritarians of the recent past.
In 2015, Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, packed Venezuela’s supreme court days before an opposition supermajority took control of the National Assembly. The court proceeded to strip the legislature of its constitutional authorities. Likewise in 2023, Peru’s conservative legislature packed the country’s high court with loyalists, who went on to pardon the late dictator Alberto Fujimori.
By contrast, the AMLO overhaul in Mexico is gradual, if also more comprehensive in scope. The reform cuts the number of justices on the high court to nine from 11 and shortens their terms to 12 years, down from 15. Beginning in 2025, half of the court, as well as half of all federal judges, will go up for election, though incumbents can run for their own seats. Voters will then elect the remaining judges in 2027 during legislative midterms.
The Morena reform is also significantly less arbitrary than the last overhaul carried out under the PRI regime, which established Mexico’s current judiciary. In 1994, President Ernesto Zedillo eliminated 12 of the high court’s 23 members and replaced all of the remaining 11 justices. At the time, proponents argued that an independent judiciary—that is, one unresponsive to popular pressures—was needed to comply with NAFTA and promote market reforms. Zedillo’s justices would go on to uphold unpopular initiatives, such as cuts to pensions and the privatization of public trains. As in Chile, where pro-market reforms were enacted by force, the integration of Mexico into the global economy was a profoundly undemocratic process.
Those who argue that voters can’t be trusted with the responsibility of electing judges have pointed to a superficially similar experiment in Bolivia. In 2011, Evo Morales’s ruling MAS party overhauled that country’s judiciary to elect top judges. Consequently, the crony-stacked Constitutional Court ruled that Morales had a “human right” to indefinite re-election. This, despite the fact that Bolivians voted resoundingly against the president’s wishes in a mandatory referendum.
“The Bolivian experiment represents a cautionary tale on the perils of majority rule,” warned the journalist Raúl Peñaranda in a commentary on Mexico’s reforms. But this is a misreading of the country’s judicial system. In Bolivia, the MAS-controlled legislature nominates judicial candidates for election, and Bolivian candidates don’t campaign for office. The end result is high voter abstention as MAS partisans rubber stamp virtually unknown party cronies. Around 70 percent of voters cast blank or null votes in the 2017 judicial elections.
Conversely, Mexican judicial candidates will be nominated in equal parts by the legislature, the president, and the currently opposition-aligned judiciary. Candidates must also have at least five years of relevant experience, down from 10 years currently, and high marks on judicial exams. Moreover, nominees will campaign publicly, allowing voters scrutiny over their credentials. The example of 39 US states suggests that judicial elections aren’t a recipe for tyranny.
Those decrying Mexico’s judicial reform as an assault on democracy tend to omit any discussion of the judiciary’s current subversion of duly enacted laws. In 2018, AMLO cut his salary by 60 percent under the mantra that “there can be no rich government in a poor country.” Per the Mexican constitution, no public servant can earn more than the sitting president, currently $80,000 a year. Yet federal judges have refused to abide by this rule, and have filed unconstitutional injunctions against the Morena reform. As of 2023, high-court justices earned $240,000.
Not coincidentally, the current PRI-designed courts are replete with conflicts of interest and nepotism. Chief Justice Norma Piña, a virulent AMLO critic, presides over the judiciary’s top ethics and budgetary entities, meaning she supervises her own conduct and finances. The Morena reform addresses each of these issues by establishing an independent and elected disciplinary tribunal. It also forces judges to abide by the administration’s pay cuts.
None of this is to suggest that the judicial reform is above criticism. For one thing, the novel system fails to meaningfully tackle the issue of criminal impunity, which currently hovers above 90 percent. In AMLO’s telling, the reform allows Mexican voters to hold judges who release cartel hitmen or white-collar criminals to account. He has also claimed that the reduction in requisite judicial experience will improve the system by uplifting younger judges. But these are fundamental misreadings of the rampant dysfunction of Mexican justice. Critics are correct that the bar for candidates should be higher and changes to the police and prosecutorial apparatus would do far more to combat crime.
Given Mexico’s ongoing nearshoring boom, concerns regarding the country’s investment environment are also justified. The USMCA, which replaced NAFTA in 2018, is up for review in 2026, which entails negotiations with a potentially hostile Washington over thorny issues such as Chinese EVs. Many investors are understandably concerned about what regulatory changes new judges might bring. Questions also remain regarding the logistics of judicial elections. Voters may need to elect up to 40 judges at a time in 2025 and 2027. As in any democracy, it will take time to iron out kinks in implementation—a major task for the president-elect.
One of AMLO’s greatest virtues—which sets him apart from Chávez, Morales, and other left-wing strongmen with whom he has been compared—is his commitment to the prohibition on presidential re-election. Upon taking office, Chávez rewrote the Venezuelan constitution to extend his term to six years from five previously. Then in 2009, he did away with term limits altogether, allowing him—and later Maduro—to govern for life. AMLO, in contrast, chose to amend the constitution to allow for a presidential recall. In the event of a recall, a simple majority of Mexicans can remove the president from office assuming turnout meets a 40 percent threshold. Even if Sheinbaum succeeds in installing a PRI-style regime, it will be a strange dictatorship where voters can recall the sitting president.
“Rather than stifle democracy, AMLO and Morena have embraced it.”
In his last state of the union speech, the president proclaimed: “Democracy is composed of two parts, demos are the people, and kratos is power. We want kratos with demos! What the oligarchs want is power without the people … to hell with [them]!” Uncomfortable as these words may be for the opposition, far too many Mexicans consider them to be true. Rather than stifle democracy, AMLO and Morena have embraced it. Critics fail to appreciate that they are best off opposing Morena by appealing to voters, as opposed to partisans in the judiciary.
In 2024, Mexicans overwhelmingly rewarded Morena in the polls because the party had largely delivered on its promises—one of those being that it would not pursue change by way of repression and fraud. So long as AMLO, Sheinbaum, and their party continue to abide by this commitment, they will continue to prove their critics wrong.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Venezuela abolished presidential term limits.