Politicians, academics and writers defended the work of the National Electoral Institute (INE) and rejected “recent amagos to discredit election advisers.”
In a letter – signed by 2,387 people – they warned that weakening their public presence would only benefit those who “refuse to let citizens vote decide the results of the elections.”
“The National Electoral Institute is the heritage of Mexican democracy. Thanks to that institution, and the rules it has a responsibility to implement, in our country we have clean, competitive and fair choices,” they note in the letter.
“The INE is today a victim of defamatory expressions that seek to discredit it,” they argued.
Last Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador referred to the INE as the “supreme conservative power” after his General Council approved removing Félix Salgado Macedonio’s candidacy.
“It’s strange because they didn’t do it before, now they’re becoming the supreme conservative power, they already decide who’s a candidate and who’s not. It wasn’t like that before, they may have changed the laws, or before they didn’t apply and now they do,” he said at his morning conference.
After the INE revoked morena’s 48 other contenders, the national leader of this party, Mario Delgado, said the institute “got stuck in the past, applying old PRIAN practices,” so “you’ll have to think seriously from the Union Congress whether to renew or exterminate it.”
“We cannot allow a setback in democratic advancement; the democracy we have in the country today is the result of a struggle of the people of Mexico of many years and now the right is trying to use the electoral institution to stop the movement,” he declared this March 29, from Villahermosa, Tabasco.
The Morenist leader accused election advisers of acting as “PRIAN gatilleros” and invited them to confront Morena through the polls.
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