A qualified majority of eight judges out of the eleven on the Supreme Court threatened to vote for annulment. But the last minute change of camp by one of them shifted the balance of power. “The present appeals for unconstitutionality are rejected,” the Court wrote in its judgment after more than five hours of public deliberations.
Promulgated in mid-September by former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador after a complex adoption process by the national parliament and those of a majority of states, the reform is ardently defended by the new President Sheinbaum, inaugurated on the 1st october.
A last minute change of heart
Largely in the majority in Parliament, the left justifies this reform to fight against “corruption”, “nepotism” and the “privileges” of unelected judges.
“I welcome the fact that reason, decency, legality prevailed,” Senate President Gerardo Fernández Noroña told reporters after the court’s decision.
A draft ruling prepared by one of the Court’s judges, Juan Luis Gonzalez Alcantara, partially annulled the reform by declaring constitutional the election by universal suffrage of the magistrates of the Supreme Court, but not that of lower-ranking judges. To be adopted, this judgment had to be approved by at least eight of the eleven judges of the Supreme Court.
Until Tuesday, only three judges considered close to the left had announced that they would vote against. But against all expectations, they were joined at the start of the hearing by a fourth magistrate, who harshly criticized the reform but refused to declare it contrary to the Mexican Constitution.
To cancel the reform “would be to respond to a madness irresponsibly brought to the supreme text (the Constitution), with another equivalent madness,” justified this judge, Alberto Pérez Dayán.
Fear of a constitutional crisis of unprecedented severity
This decision removes the possibility of a crisis between the presidency and the judiciary. The Movement for National Regeneration (Morena, left), in power since 2018, accuses the justice system of being at the service of a conservative elite. The opposition and judicial officials, who have been mobilized for weeks, denounce a challenge to the independence of the judiciary.
Demonstrators gathered during the debates, broadcast live on the Internet, in front of the headquarters of the Supreme Court in Mexico. “The judicial power must be a counterweight to other powers,” demonstrator Maria de los Angeles Ortiz, 54, a clerk at the Supreme Court, told AFPTV. “The reform must not pass” otherwise “Mexico will sink further into drug trafficking, into poverty, into the corruption of the judges put in place by Morena,” she added.
With the “politicization of the judicial system”, investors may wonder whether “disagreements between the business community and the government will be resolved in an impartial manner”, asked the British company Capital Economics in a note to its customers.
Analysts feared that a reversal of the reform by the Supreme Court would trigger a constitutional crisis of unprecedented severity. Claudia Sheinbaum believed that the Supreme Court did not have the power to overturn a reform without itself violating the Constitution. “We cannot go back on what the people decided” and on what “is already part of the Constitution,” she said on Tuesday.
