Politics: What Baja’s "Ley Bonilla" may portend

MEXICO - Report 22 Jul 2019 by Guillermo Valdes, Alejandro Hope Pinsón and Francisco González

A particularly bizarre series of recent events in the state of Baja California raises many questions about the dynamics of party politics at this early stage of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Fourth Transformation, and the tensions building within his own Morena party. Like many other states before it, Baja Norte, as it is sometimes referred to, scheduled elections for an abbreviated two-year gubernatorial term as part of a nationwide effort to align the country’s state and federal electoral calendars with the usual six-year gubernatorial terms to resume thereafter. But a funny thing happened on the way to this past June’s elections in the border state.

Confident of victory because support had plummeted for the traditional governing parties in the state (the PRI and, for the past 30 years, the PAN), even before Election Day the Morena campaign began pushing for the gubernatorial term to be extended to six years. Less than two months after that effort was nixed by the federal electoral court in response to legal challenges by opposition parties, state legislators in those same parties as well as the outgoing PAN governor, did a seemingly inexplicable about-face and rushed through an amendment to the state constitution assuring the governor-elect a five-year term.

The amendment is patently unconstitutional and will not prosper, but despite reports that the departing members of the state congress and governor had been bought off with money and/or promises of protection from criminal prosecution on corruption charges, national party leaderships have been awkwardly restrained and selective in their responses. The same can be said of AMLO, for whom the whole matter is particularly problematic not only because he has long premised his political proposal on the idea that his personal example will serve to eradicate the corruption at the root of all the country’s problems, but also because of opposition warnings that he is looking for ways to remain in office beyond his six-year term. He may claim he is avoiding a return to the days when a Mexican president was free to impose his will on every aspect of political life, but there are reasons to doubt such claims.

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