Twice in recent months, first on Nov. 13 and then on Feb. 26, tens of thousands of Mexicans took to the streets to protest a new law that will gut the nation’s autonomous electoral authority. Their cries of distress should be heard widely — and heeded. The electoral law, championed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and signed by him in recent days, is a knife stabbing at the heart of Mexico’s democracy.
“Don’t touch our vote!” the demonstrators chanted in Mexico City’s Zócalo, the vast square in front of the presidential palace, many wearing shirts and baseball caps in pink, the color of the National Electoral Institute, or INE, that would be sundered by the new law. “We’re not ready to lose our democracy,” Óscar Casanova, a businessman, told The Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan.
For seven decades, Mexico was ruled by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost the presidential contest in 2000, opening the way to a period of multiparty competition. The National Electoral Institute has played a key role in this transition as an independent, nonpartisan authority, deploying thousands of workers who issue voter IDs and control virtually all aspects of state and federal balloting. The new law would emasculate the INE, requiring it to close 40 offices around the country and sharply reduce its staff and resources. It would also weaken the agency’s enforcement mechanisms, limiting its ability to sanction candidates for severe offenses.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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Mr. López Obrador, a populist who is genuinely popular, claims the electoral authority is a bloated bureaucracy and that he will transfer savings to the poor. But there are deeper, personal reasons behind his actions. He nurses grievances over his narrow election loss in 2006, which the election authority certified. The Mexican constitution limits Mr. López Obrador to one six-year term, which ends in 2024, but a weakened electoral system could ease the way for his chosen successor and let his party remain in power.
Now that Mr. López Obrador has signed the bill into law, the courts are the last chance to stop it. Hopefully, they will recognize the potential damage and block it, but Mr. López Obrador has not been shy about meddling with the legal system.
The United States cannot ignore the weakening of democracy in Mexico. The interests of the two nations are tightly intertwined, with huge border flows of goods and people. The United States also is striving to combat the scourge of fentanyl manufacturing that has picked up pace in Mexico in recent years. Moreover, Mr. López Obrador’s move marks another step backward for democracy around the world. As Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) quite correctly warned in a statement, “Returning Mexico to its dark past of presidentially controlled elections not only sets the clock back on its democracy, but also U.S.-Mexico relations.”