Politics: AMLO sets his sights on the Electoral Authority
In a pattern that has become apparent to most observers of the recent rise of populist regimes and the manner in which they manage to dismantle democratic institutions and entrench themselves in power, during its first year in power the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been in a hurry. He started with a commanding congressional majority but has quickly moved to neutralize autonomous bodies capable of acting as counterweights, while denouncing the media. Budget cuts, the rewriting of laws, installing agency heads loyal to the government while denigrating existing officers who fail to meekly play along are some of the preferred tactics employed so far.
Now he may be gearing up to tackle the electoral process more directly, for starters both by trying to starve the opposition of public funding (there is talk of slashing it by anywhere from 50 to 70% as well as greatly curtailing the number of seats in congress elected on the basis of proportional representation) and by both debilitating and exerting greater influence on the country’s electoral authority, with which AMLO has had a fraught relationship across three presidential campaigns. The INE’s efforts to hold the administration and the governing party accountable this past year have done nothing to endear him and have put the agency directly in the President’s sights. Under the pretext of the government’s austerity campaign, Congress just cut the institution’s budget by 9%, a move the INE governing council protested as putting at risk the institute’s work, including preparations for the 2021 elections, registering new voters and the obligatory issuance of new voter ID's for all those currently enrolled.
Considerable hurdles remain that could slow the process of capturing the authority. Political costs may deter the administration from trying to put loyalists in all four of the new INE board positions to be filled in April. And it doesn’t appear that the government has a political reform bill prepared to present to the current session of Congress. However, following months of preparatory hearings, it will have the first nine months of 2020 to overhaul electoral laws in time for such changes to take effect for the 2021 midterms.
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