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Mexico’s Senate has approved a radical plan to have voters elect all its judges, a move that has weakened its currency and risks undermining investor confidence in the US’s biggest trading partner.
After a frantic day in which protesters stormed congress, the opposition denounced threats from the ruling Morena party and an opposition senator was detained, the changes were passed early on Wednesday in a general vote by the required two-thirds majority, with 86 votes in favour and 41 against.
The measures had already passed the lower house and after more discussion of individual articles in the Senate in the next few days will go for final approval to state legislatures, most of which are dominated by Morena.
The constitutional changes have been championed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftwing populist who has worked to remake Mexico’s political system and strengthen his party’s grip on power.
In the centre of Mexico City, riot police fired tear gas as protesters regrouped outside the temporary chamber lawmakers set up to pass the reform.
“This will result in the end of the separation of powers, the end of the republic as we know it, and the inauguration of an authoritarian regime,” Senator Ricardo Anaya from the opposition National Action party (PAN) said on the Senate floor.
The peso was 0.5 per cent lower against the dollar at 19.99 in early Wednesday trading. It is one of the world’s weakest major emerging market currencies this year, down 17.6 per cent against the dollar since the June 2 general election.
The legislative passage of the legal reforms has spooked investors and could leave the court system in limbo just as López Obrador’s handpicked successor Claudia Sheinbaum takes office on October 1. Sheinbaum has backed the changes.
Investors had been bullish on Mexico for several years, as analysts predicted it would benefit from a shift in manufacturing away from China closer to the US amid geopolitical tensions and supply chain disruptions.
But Washington has warned that Mexico’s legal changes put democracy and security at risk, with the bilateral relationship now at its most fragile point in years.
Gerardo Esquivel, a former central bank board member, said a recession next year was now likely, and that the worst impact of the legal overhaul would be over the medium and longer terms.
“Our economy will be seen as more risky . . . private investment, domestic and foreign, will be lower,” he said. “We’ll have wasted the best opportunity to grow we’ve had in decades.”
The plan means about 7,000 state and federal judges will be fired — including the entire supreme court — and replaced in two elections: half in 2025 and half in 2027. It also gives the government broad powers over the selection of candidates and loosens the experience and qualification required for the roles.
A video of a furious, young protester in the Senate showed him screaming from the balcony at lawmakers: “You’re finishing the country, my country is dying.”
Alejandro Moreno, leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), claimed that senators were getting messages from drug trafficking groups to get them to approve it.
But proponents of the reform say voters chose it at the ballot box. Morena put constitutional change at the heart of an election campaign that saw Sheinbaum win the presidency and its lawmakers gain a near supermajority.
“The justice system isn’t benefiting society, it’s benefiting a select few,” said Lina Zamora, a spokesperson for Jóvenes por la Reforma, an activist group in favour of the changes, adding that “36 million people support . . . the judicial reform”.
The government coalition was one vote short in the Senate but an opposition senator from a family long associated with the PAN, Miguel Ángel Yunes, switched sides to back the measure.
Yunes said the proposal could be improved in secondary legislation and that he backed a new model for the justice system, but former colleagues and political columnists allege he struck a deal with Morena for prosecutors to drop multiple criminal investigations into his family members.
Opponents say the changes are part of a broader project by López Obrador to take Mexico back to the authoritarian one-party system it had for much of the 20th century.
Movimiento Ciudadano, an opposition party, said one of its senators, Daniel Barreda, had been illegally detained with his father in his home state of Campeche and unable to turn up to vote. Morena leaders said that was not true.
“Today on the floor I denounced what we’re living through: a return to the times when the voices of citizens were ignored,” said MC Senator Alejandra Barrales. “We’ll go back to the policy of ‘I don’t see or hear them’, while the state persecutes those who oppose it.”
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