Back to the single party

The electoral reform proposal presented by President López Obrador is a step back to the times of the single party, it is a way of erasing the last 40 years of institutional life with the stroke of a pen, it is an attempt to stay in power, with López Obrador or without him, at the helm. The president wants to return to revolutionary nationalism and statism hand in hand with them, to the single party.
Some point of the proposal is salvageable, such as resorting to electronic voting. But for there to be confidence in these mechanisms, an autonomous body such as the INE must be maintained. The proposal seeks to destroy it, to put an end to it and to the independent directors. From the moment the councillors and magistrates of the Electoral Tribunal are asked to be elected by direct vote, the whole essence of the electoral scaffolding that we have built in the last four decades is lost. Electing the councilors and magistrates by popular vote is like deciding in the same way who will lead the general hospital or the rector of the UNAM. It doesn’t make sense. Electing councillors as is currently done (two-thirds of the votes in the Senate, after selection by a committee of experts of the candidates) seems to be a good way to maintain some autonomy and, at the same time, equity. There is no point in changing it.
The reform seeks to govern with fictitious absolute majorities. Our old model without plurinominal deputies was the one that allowed the existence of the single party. Deputies emerge from their district and it does not matter if they won by one vote or by thousands: the one who wins keeps everything. And even in the last elections we have already seen how more and more there are forces of all kinds that can manipulate the vote in the districts.
The plurinominal deputies were incorporated since the reform of Reyes Heroles in the government of López Portillo to begin to break that absolute hegemony, to give spaces, voice and vote to the minorities. Recall that in that 1976 election, López Portillo at the height of the supremacy of the single party was the only candidate: the other parties such as the PCM were outlawed and a divided PAN preferred not to participate.
For one of these paradoxes of life one of the deputies of the Communist Party who was in the first legislature as a plurinominal deputy was Pablo Gómez. Today he is the one who proposes to annihilate it.
With the senators perhaps there could be some different movement, because the plurinominal list of senators does have a problem, we said it since it was instituted. While deputies are supposed to represent the people, senators represent the states. That there are two majority and one minority is a good formula, and so was the plurinominal list, to have greater representativeness but it turns out that with it the representation that the states have is unbalanced. It is a design flaw, which has a good intention: that the number of senators be more or less proportional to the vote of the citizens.
Without a doubt, we must reduce the financing of the parties, it has grown excessively, but we must establish autonomous mechanisms to control the finances of the parties, because otherwise what we will have is again the return of the past: the party in power of its resources to overwhelm its opponents and as the electoral bodies will not be in fact autonomous the imbalance, as it was for 70 years, it will be absolute.
Resources must be reduced to the parties, self-financing must be opened, but the only way to do this is with rules that are strictly applied and with autonomous bodies that enforce them. With this proposal, what is sought is simply to hang the opponents financially.
Another absurd proposal is that of the times of radio and television. The current ones are a barbarity that arose precisely from a demand of López Obrador after the 2006 elections, outraged by that campaign that he was a danger to Mexico. A campaign, by the way, that was no different in aggressiveness to the one carried out then by his candidacy and even much softer than the current campaign of denouncing his opponents as traitors to the homeland that is promoted directly from the presidency of the republic.
Radio and television times must be drastically reduced for everyone, and those who want to advertise whether parties or citizens must be able to do so freely. Because, in addition, that already happens both in the written press and in social networks and internet channels, which have, the latter, increasing audiences. While hanging the mainstream media, the emerging media are left in absolute freedom. they sell millions in covert or covert advertising without any control, including the manipulation of fake news and smear campaigns.
There is much more, but let’s stick with one point just to finish today. Those who lead and present this initiative are two senior officials of the State security system, with access to all kinds of privileged information and resources: Pablo Gómez, director of the Financial Intelligence Unit and Horacio Duarte, director of Customs. The two have indeed spent their entire lives on electoral issues, but so what the hell are they now in such sophisticated areas of security?
The conclusion is that they have turned them via information and resources into an electoral instrument. With that combination of policy, security and money, what could go wrong?



Original source in Spanish