Mexico: Congress rejects AMLO's electoral reform, but will move forward by another route

Mexico's Chamber of Deputies on Tuesday rejected the controversial electoral reform proposed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in April. The proposal obtained 269 votes in favor and 225 against, but could not go forward because it did not have the necessary two-thirds.

The reform, which according to some critics could end the independence of the authorities, sought to replace the country's autonomous electoral body, the National Electoral Institute (INE), with another of lesser capacity but with more authority.

Other points of the reform proposed that its authorities be elected through a system of universal suffrage; cutting funding to political parties, reducing the number of plurinominal deputies and senators as well as the implementation of electronic voting both inside and outside Mexico.

Reducing the cost of the system, AMLO's reform's stated objective

The objective of the Morena party and those who support López Obrador's government with this reform was to to reduce the cost of the Mexican political system by some 24 billion Mexican pesos (US$1.2 billion) as well as to eliminate electoral fraud, as AMLO assured the people when he announced the proposal on his website:

Massive demonstrations against the reform

However, the initiative has several points with which a large part of the citizens do not agree. This led them to organize marches in Mexico City as well as in thirty other cities to express their opposition to the proposal which, according to the opposition parties, is a strategy whose sole purpose is to eliminate INE.

The marches were called, according to CNN, by some 50 civil organizations, political parties and opposition legislators and, in them, the PAN, PRD and PRI parties announced that they would run against the project.

The Mexican president, seeing the affluence of the proposals, assured that "the alleged aggression against INE is unfounded" and accused the demonstrators of going "against the transformation" that is taking place in the country: "The march was very important. It was like a kind of political and public striptease of the count conservatism in Mexico," he said the day after the marches.

He also called the protest "racist" and "classist" and announced that he and his Morena party, which has a large majority in Congress, had a "plan B" in case the initiative did not go forward.

Lopez Obrador's "plan B".

This second alternative, which Congress approved a few hours ago, would only modify the secondary laws without affecting the Constitution, as proposed in the original reform. This implies that a two-thirds approval would not be necessary to go ahead, but a simple majority in favor of "plan B" would be sufficient.

The new attempt, explained in a document of more than 300 pages, includes a new set of reforms that López Obrador presented after the November demonstrations: "Limits are established to the arbitrary actions of both INE and TEPJF [Electoral Tribunal] with respect to interpretations outside the law that have limited freedom of expression, political-electoral rights, and the self-determination of political parties, amongst others," reads the document to which the newspaper El País had access.

A plan that, like the original electoral reform, has several critics against it, such as INE's electoral counselor, Ciro Murayama, or the president of Acción Nacional, Markos Cortés, who expressed their opposition to the initiative on their social networks: