By Ines Pousadela, CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
On 1 June, Mexico made history by becoming the only country in the world to elect all its judges by popular vote, from local magistrates to Supreme Court justices. This unprecedented process saw Mexican voters choose candidates for 881 federal judicial positions, including all nine Supreme Court justices, plus thousands at local levels across 19 states. Yet what the government heralded as a transformation that made Mexico the ‘the most democratic country in the world’ may turn out to be a dangerous deception.
Judicial independence under attack
The judicial election was the culmination of a controversial constitutional reengineering pushed through by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and embraced by his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party promoted the change as a bold democratic measure to eliminate corruption, increase transparency and make judges accountable to the people rather than political or economic elites. But this narrative masked a more troubling reality. The judicial overhaul was the final piece in a systematic assault on institutions that checked executive power during López Obrador’s presidency. Between 2018 and 2024, the National Electoral Institute faced repeated budget cuts and legislative attacks. The National Institute for Access to Public Information was eliminated in late 2024, leaving oversight of public information access in the hands of an executive-dependent secretariat.
Read on Inter Press Service
