Mexico’s Senate.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Mexico’s Senate voted early Wednesday (September 11, 2024) to overhaul the country’s judiciary, clearing the biggest hurdle for a controversial constitutional revision that will make all judges stand for election, a change that critics fear will politicize the judicial branch and threaten Mexico’s democracy.

The approval came in two votes after hundreds of protesters pushed their way into the Senate on Tuesday (September 10, 2024), interrupting the session after it appeared that Morena, the governing party of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had lined up the necessary votes to pass the proposal.

The legislation sailed through the lower chamber, where Morena and its allies hold a supermajority, last week. Approval by the Senate posed the biggest obstacle and required defections from opposition parties.

One came Tuesday from the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) after a lawmaker who had previously spoken out against the overhaul took leave for medical reasons and his father, a former governor, suggested he would vote for the proposal. The lawmaker ended up returning to his seat to give the proposal the last vote it needed.

Both of the Senate votes were 86-41, with the second result coming around 4 a.m. The chamber erupted into cheers and chants of “Yes, we could!”

The legislation must now be ratified by the legislatures of at least 17 of Mexico’s 32 States. The governing party is believed to have the necessary support after major gains in recent elections. Oaxaca’s legislature became the first to ratify it just hours after the Senate’s approval.

President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who takes office Oct. 1, congratulated lawmakers on passing the overhaul.

The election of judges “will strengthen the delivery of justice in our country,” Ms. Sheinbaum wrote on the social media platform X. “The regime of corruption and privileges each day is being left farther in the past and a true democracy and true rule of law are being built.”

On Tuesday evening, just hours after the governing party appeared to have wrangled the votes it needed, protesters with pipes and chains broke into the Senate chamber. At least one person fainted.

The protesters said lawmakers were not listening to their demands.

“The judiciary isn’t going to fall,” yelled the protesters, waving Mexican flags and signs opposing the overhaul. They were joined by a number of opposition senators as they chanted in the chamber. Others outside roared when newscasters announced the Senate was taking a recess.

Among them was Alejandro Navarrete, a 30-year-old judicial worker, who said that people like him working in the courts “knowing the danger the reform represents” came to call on the Senate to strike down the proposal.

“They have decided to sell out the nation and sell out for political capital they were offered. We felt obligated to enter the Senate,” he said, carrying a Mexican flag. “Our intention is not violent, we didn’t intend to hurt them, but we intend to make it clear that the Mexican people won’t allow them to lead us into a dictatorship.”

But a short time later the Senate reconvened in another location and resumed debate on the proposal. An initial vote in favor came shortly after midnight.

The approval came after weeks of protests by judicial employees and law students.

Critics and observers say the plan, under which all judges would be elected, could threaten judicial independence and undermine the system of checks and balances.

López Obrador, a populist long averse to independent regulatory bodies who has ignored courts and attacked judges, says the plan would crack down on corruption by making it easier to punish judges. Critics say it would handicap the judiciary, stack courts with judges favoring the president’s party, allow anyone with a law degree to become a judge and even make it easier for politicians and criminals to influence courts.

It has spooked investors and prompted U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar to call it a “risk” to democracy and an economic threat.