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Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has accused the country’s supreme court of overstepping its functions and “trying to change what the people of Mexico decided” as it prepares to discuss whether to strike down parts of a transformative judicial reform.
The court is expected to vote on Tuesday whether the controversial reform violates other parts of the constitution, setting up a showdown with Sheinbaum barely a month into her government.
The move would shift Mexico to a system where almost all of its judges, including the supreme court, are elected by popular vote.
No other country in the world has such a system. The US elects judges at the lower level, while Bolivia elects 26 judges across its top courts. But in Mexico, thousands of positions at all levels would be put to the vote.
Proponents say the reform is needed to root out corruption in the judicial system. Opponents say it will do little to address corruption, but will hand the ruling Morena party control of the courts, while giving organised crime groups another chance to impose their candidates in elections.
“It has to be made very clear that eight justices cannot be above the people,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday.
Morena already has a level of political power not seen for decades in Mexico, after its landslide election victory in June gave it a supermajority in Congress and control of enough state legislatures to change the constitution at will.
It has passed a whirl of amendments since, including the judicial reform in September.
The judicial system itself has come out strongly against the reform, with strikes and protests. Though three members of the supreme court have said they support the reform, the other eight showed their resistance by declaring they would not run in the elections scheduled for August 2025.
Now the court will discuss whether the judicial reform violates existing precepts in the constitution in a last-ditch effort to stop it moving forwards.
This has already prompted the legislative to pass another amendment last week that blocks the court from reviewing legal challenges to any constitutional reforms, potentially nullifying any decision that the court takes.
That means if the supreme court does vote against the judicial reform, Mexico will be in uncharted territory. And Sheinbaum will have to decide whether to ignore or comply with the ruling.
“This will lead to a constitutional crisis of a kind we have not seen for the duration of the 1917 constitution,” Olvera Rangel told Proceso, a Mexican magazine.
The dispute has dominated the agenda during Sheinbaum’s first month in government, sucking attention away from other issues such as the expansion of social programs, the further militarisation of public security, and the rising violence in states such as Sinaloa and Chiapas.
It has also spooked markets, leading the peso to depreciate more than 15% against the dollar, and drawn rare public criticism from the US, Mexico’s largest trade partner, which said it jeopardised democracy and rule of the law in the country.
To defuse the crisis, one supreme court judge, Juan Luis González Alcántara, has suggested a compromise: that the top courts stand for election, but the thousands of other judges do not.
But it is unclear whether the other judges on the supreme court would agree to this, let alone Sheinbaum and her party.
Sheinbaum inherited the judicial reform from former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who founded Morena and was frustrated when the courts blocked some of his key policies.
Even if Sheinbaum was inclined to negotiate with the supreme court, she could face resistance from power brokers within Morena.
In any case, she has showed no signs of backing down, accusing the court of being a political actor and violating the constitution itself.
On Monday she added that her government has a plan in case the court goes against the judicial reform: “We are prepared, whichever way they vote.”