Mexican Government Loyalists Sweep First Universal Judiciary Election » The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Mexico held elections for its judiciary at every level on June 1. These, the first such elections since reforms making the judiciary elected were passed last fall, saw a sweep by Mexico’s dominant party.

The political party Morena, or the National Regeneration Movement, has swept Mexican elections consistently since 2018, when its founder, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected president on a left-wing platform.

López Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, championed the idea of becoming the second nation in the world after Bolivia to elect all of its judges. In addition, over 20 American states have some form of judicial elections, most of them officially nonpartisan. 

The Mexican government was accused of bribing opposition senators and even detaining one senator to prevent their attendance at the crucial vote. In the end, opposition senator Miguel Ángel Yunes switched his position to support the measure, giving it the necessary votes for passage. 

In response, American and Canadian authorities warned that Mexico may see a downturn in investment in response to a perceived weakening of democracy.

The Pew Research Center found that 66 percent of Mexicans supported universal judicial elections, while only 29 percent opposed them. The same survey found an 83 percent approval rating for Sheinbaum. In contrast, fewer than a third of Mexicans approved of conservative opposition parties to Sheinbaum.

Only 13 percent of Mexicans actually voted in the judicial elections, but only 10.4 percent actually had their votes counted due to the high occurrence of reportedly spoiled or blank ballots.  

Voters were often given lists hundreds of candidates long, out of which they were told to vote for dozens. An exception was the state of Durango, where all three branches of state government collaborated to put forth a united list of allied judges. Thus, voters were given only one option per position.

Although the complete results of the over 2,600 races occurring at once have not been tallied, candidates aligned with Sheinbaum and the ruling establishment won every seat on Mexico’s Supreme Court. 

Due to the large number of candidates, the judge elected with the most votes still won only 5 percent of the total. One new member of the Supreme Court won the backing of only 2.7 percent of voters.

Electoral violence during the judicial elections was lower than in other contests in the recent past. The number of candidates for office murdered, usually by cartels, during the 2024 election cycle was nearly 40. This is enough that Wikipedia maintains an entire page to list them.

Mexico has only been a democracy since reforms were passed in the late 1990s. Morena rocketed to power in 2018, only four years after it was created. In 2024, facing widespread allegations of undermining the nascent democracy, it won in a landslide against an alliance of all three parties in Mexico’s past three-party system.

These results are expected to prevent any constitutional concerns from being raised with the use of executive and governmental power by Mexican leadership. 

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