A history of direct democracy in Mexico

Illustration, Andrea Paredes, Animal Politico

Mexico is one of the countries that has introduced the most mechanisms of direct democracy into its legislation over the past 20 years.

Following multiple reforms to the constitution and secondary laws, the Mexican political system has managed to transition from a semi-authoritarian hegemonic party regime to an alternating democracy in which electoral processes take place normally.

The Mexican transition stands out for having overcome the single-party stage, electoral fraud and outbreaks of social conflict – with a good dose of violence – triggered by citizens’ discontent at the way the official party and its government cheated each time elections were held.

Elections were a problem, not a solution.

But thanks to step-by-step reforms backed by a broad consensus among political forces, and enhanced by input from academia and society, Mexico overcame that stage and today has a functional electoral democracy. This has gradually resulted in election days taking place without major conflict, electoral disputes being resolved in the courts, and an unprecedented degree of political alternation.

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Nonetheless, electoral democracy has not solved the country’s longstanding problems, which, in many cases, have been exacerbated despite the legitimacy of the freely elected governments. These are in particular insecurity, violence, poverty and inequality.

Dissatisfaction with democracy has grown and, with it, the grievances of millions of citizens who do not feel represented by political parties, lawmakers and elected officials, and who have been demanding new forms of political participation.

Against this backdrop, myriad citizen movements and expressions of discontent have emerged in recent years, calling for mechanisms of participation that do not rely on a party system that they distrust.

Perhaps the most significant expression of this citizen malaise occurred in 2009, when a group of young people rallied voters to cast blank, null or spoiled ballots in the mid-term federal elections to renew the Chamber of Deputies.

Following a campaign by citizen groups across the country, 1.8 million people annulled their ballot or left it blank in the elections that were held on June 5, 2009; that is, 5% of all those who voted on that day. This represented an important breakthrough, since null votes had historically stood at around 2% of nationwide voting.

After this, the instigators of the null-vote campaign went on to organise the National Citizens’ Assembly (known by its Spanish acronym, ANCA), which laboured for months to produce a political reform proposal which it submitted to the federal government and which included several mechanisms of direct democracy; after a long negotiation process these were incorporated into the Mexican Constitution in 2012, the last year of President Felipe Calderón’s six-year term of office. They were: 1. independent or non-partisan candidacies; 2. citizens’ initiatives; 3. public consultations; and 4. the consecutive re-election of lawmakers and mayors, as a means for the electorate to monitor the actions of public servants and hold them accountable.

In 2014, in the wake of further political reform, the national electoral system was improved, the Federal Electoral Institute became the current National Electoral Institute (known as the INE), a new Law on Public Consultation was passed and rules for independent candidacies were set.

Non-partisan candidacies

Independent candidacies got off to an impressive start in the 2015 elections: the northern State of Nuevo León elected a non-partisan governor, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, known as ‘el Bronco’. In Sinaloa, Manuel J. Clouthier won a seat as a federal deputy after running and financing his campaign as a non-partisan candidate. In Jalisco, a young man named Pedro Kumamoto reached the State Congress in this manner. And three municipalities were won by independent candidates: Morelia, in Michoacán; Comonfort, in Guanajuato; and García, in Nuevo León.

Of all the winners, Kumamoto was the only one who had never been a member of a political party. All the others had resigned from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or the National Action Party (PAN), the longest-running parties in the Mexican political system.

Since then, independent candidates have continued to come forward at both state and federal levels, although this path is practically closed to ordinary citizens because of one major prerequisite: in order to register, contenders must have collected a minimum percentage of signatures of voters on the electoral roll. This obliges non-partisan hopefuls to set up very costly regional structures and promotional machines very similar to those used by political parties.

Thus, in the 2018 presidential elections, the only independent candidacies who got anywhere were two people connected to political parties, who had substantial support structures and sponsors and links with government bodies: they were the former first lady of Mexico, Margarita Zavala, and the “independent” governor of Nuevo León, Jaime Rodríguez, ‘el Bronco’, who used his government’s resources to finance the collection of signatures.

In the end, however, their candidacies were a flop. Zavala did not even make it to polling day, having pulled out a month-and-a-half before the elections. ‘El Bronco’ came in a distant fourth, while facing criminal proceedings for violating campaign financing rules.

The National Electoral Institute, meanwhile, determined that nearly all the independent presidential candidates had cheated in the collection of signatures of support from the citizens; all, that is, except the indigenous candidate María de Jesús Patricio, known as Marichuy, who had been endorsed to register as an independent candidate by the National Indigenous Council and the commanders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (a guerrilla group that rose up in arms against the government of Chiapas State in 1994).

Marichuy’s campaign was backed by intellectuals and civil groups, as her only aim was to put the indigenous agenda in the public debate, and not to become president. Without a single case of cheating, Marichuy collected 281,000 signatures, a third of the 866,000 signatures she needed, making it impossible for the National Electoral Institute to register her as a candidate. She did not make it to election day, but her testimony exposed the jiggery-pokery of Zavala and ‘el Bronco’, whose thousands of fake signatures were detected by the institute – but which nonetheless ended up registering them as candidates.

Marichuy’s case clearly revealed the ineffectiveness of a mechanism of direct democracy that very quickly lost its initial charm.

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Citizens’ initiatives

The newly created citizens’ initiative also contained the requirement that its instigators collect the signatures of a percentage of citizens registered on the electoral list.

In recent years, different groups have tried to promote 11 citizens’ initiatives, only one of which has been successful: the so-called #Ley3de3 against corruption, which obliges politicians to present their assets, tax and conflict-of-interest declarations in order to run for public office. This law, which was proposed in 2016 with thousands of citizens’ signatures, only went through in the end because a group of senators decided to endorse and present the initiative, since the deadline for finalising the citizens’ initiative process had already passed.

Since then, other groups have tried to push through citizens’ laws on issues such as drinking-water supply, the provision of medicines for children with cancer, or the legalisation of cannabis, but without success.

Public consultations

After Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidential elections in 2018, he called a public consultation on a controversial project launched by the outgoing government: a new international airport in the Lake Texcoco area.

Arguing that it was a costly project designed for a few people to make big money, López Obrador called on citizens to vote for or against the airport. But in so doing, he did not follow the complex process for public consultations laid down in the Constitution and regulated by the National Electoral Institute but instead asked his supporters to organise their own exercise which, without the methodology or the controls provided for in the law, yielded an overwhelming majority against the airport, whose construction was cancelled despite the heavy costs that this would incur.

A month before taking office, López Obrador called another consultation, in which he invited citizens to take a stand on projects such as the Tren Maya intercity railway and the Dos Bocas oil refinery. The outcome was as to be expected: his supporters gave their backing for projects that were called into question by experts and environmentalists.

After that, López Obrador promised to promote constitutional changes in order to bring about “true democracy” in Mexico.

In early 2019 the legislative majority led by the president’s party, the National Regeneration Movement (known by the acronym Morena), in the Congress of the Union reformed article 35 of the Constitution so as to facilitate the citizens’ right to propose public consultations, and to introduce the mechanism of the recall referendum.

With regard to public consultations, Morena and its allied parties ensured that these could be held every year, and not every three years as was previously the case. They also established that consultations could be proposed by one of the two chambers of the Congress of the Union, by the head of the executive branch, or by the citizens.

However, they also laid down that citizen requests for a public consultation must be backed by the signatures of at least 2% of registered voters; that is, more than 1.8 million signatures from an electoral roll of around 90 million people.

Fulfilling a campaign promise, López Obrador announced that the first consultation would be about the possibility of bringing former presidents to trial.

This prompted the opposition parties (PRI and PAN) to impose a measure that turned out to be absurd in the long run: the date for holding population consultations was postponed to the first Sunday of August each year, instead of the first Sunday of June, when federal and local elections take place.

The first public consultation was thus called on August 1, 2021, two months after the federal and local elections of June 6 of the same year. This gave rise to numerous complications for the electoral authority, starting with the high costs involved in setting up enough voting stations to call all the citizens to the polls again, just two months after the elections.

Paradoxically, the Morena deputies – the very ones who had advocated the exercise – denied the National Electoral Institute the resources requested to carry out the public consultation. As a result, for lack of funds, the institute was able to set up only 57,000 polling stations, instead of the 160,000 needed to cover every corner of the country.

As a further control mechanism, the constitution stipulates that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation must review the constitutionality of the question being posed in a public consultation, bearing in mind that some issues, such as respect for human rights, electoral matters and the use of the armed forces, cannot be touched upon.

Thus, the question that both the president and the citizens, who gathered 2.5 million signatures in support of the 2021 consultation, originally wanted to ask was modified by the court, rendering the exact meaning unclear to the general public.

Instead of asking whether the people agreed or not to prosecute ex-presidents, from Carlos Salinas to Enrique Peña Nieto, the question printed on 90 million ballot papers read: “Do you agree or not that the relevant actions be carried out, in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework, to undertake a process of clarification of the political decisions made in the past years by political players, aimed at guaranteeing justice and the rights of potential victims?”

In the end, on August 1, 2021, 6.6 million people cast their ballots in the consultation, that is 7% of the electoral roll – which automatically invalidated the exercise, since the constitution lays down that more than 40% must participate for the vote to be legally binding.

Although 6.5 million people voted yes, perhaps thinking they were endorsing the prosecution of the ex-presidents, their vote had no consequences whatsoever. President López Obrador even said before the voting day that he was against putting his predecessors on trial (because he was “not seeking revenge”), but justified having promoted such an exercise (which cost 528 million pesos, or CHF27 million) because he wanted “the people” to have their say on the matter.

Presidential recall referendum

One month after this public consultation, a group of citizens launched a campaign to collect signatures to demand the removal from office of López Obrador.

The most interesting thing about this, however, was that those collecting the signatures were not the president’s critics but his most fervent supporters.

Instructed by López Obrador himself in his morning press conferences from the National Palace, the members of his party movement began to promote not a revocation but rather a confirmation of the president’s mandate.

Between November and December, they collected and delivered to the electoral authority more than three million signatures in support of the exercise, for which 2.8 million valid signatures were required.

Backed by the party structure, the president’s supporters far exceeded the minimum number, while – paradoxically – the opposition called for non-participation in the recall process.

As had happened with the public consultation, the legislative majority denied the National Electoral Institute the requested funds to organise the recall vote. Instead of approving the budget item of more than four billion pesos, the Chamber of Deputies allocated just over 1.5 billion pesos, meaning that once again fewer polling stations could be set up than was required by law.

Moreover, during the recall campaign, the real polemic was not between supporters and opponents of the president, but between the president and the electoral authority, which he accused of boycotting the exercise.

The president, governors and legislators from Morena waged campaigns to promote the vote, although these were prohibited by law, giving rise to constant tension between public officials at the highest level and electoral advisers, who imposed various sanctions on the officials.

The recall vote ended up becoming a snare for the National Electoral Institute: if things went badly, the entire blame would fall on the institute, a situation which would dovetail nicely with the president’s narrative against the electoral authority.

On Sunday April 10, a total of 57,448 polling stations were set up and 16,502,636 people turned out to vote, the equivalent of 17.7% of registered voters; that is, 23% less than the participation required for the exercise to be legally binding.

The question that voters found on the ballot paper was: “Do you agree that the mandate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of the United Mexican States, should be revoked due to a loss of confidence or that he should continue as the president of the republic until the end of his term?”

As could be expected, an overwhelming majority (15,159,323 people, 91.8% of voters) of those who went to the polls voted in favour of López Obrador continuing as president, while 1,063,000 voted for his mandate to be revoked, and 280,000 abstained.

The following day, López Obrador celebrated the exercise, boasting of his more than 15 million votes of support and, above all, his 91.8% approval rating. He blamed the National Electoral Institute for the low voter turnout and lamented that Mexico still lacked genuine democracy, basically through the fault of the electoral authorities, which, he said, were under the sway of the same political group that was seeking to derail his transformation project.

Exactly 18 days after the April 10 recall vote, López Obrador sent a constitutional reform initiative to Congress, in which he proposed radical changes to the workings of the electoral and party system.

Translated from Spanish by Julia Bassam

This article was published as part of a journalistic collaboration between Animal Político and SWI swissinfo.ch to exchange perspectives on democracy, its actors and the use of the tools of direct democracy in Mexico and Switzerland, in a global context.

Jesús Santamaría, Animal Político