Mexico's ruling party expands power in Supreme Court after elections marred by low turnout
Mexico's ruling party Morena will gain control of the Supreme Court following the country's first-ever judicial elections, which were marred by low voter turnout and allegations of a power grab.
Preliminary results from Sunday's race showed candidates linked with Morena winning most seats on the judiciary. With the victory, the party will now have a firm grip over every branch of government, a change that democracy advocates say weakens the country's checks and balances.
Critics have also warned that the election itself poses a risk to democracy, arguing that by having judges elected through popular vote, the independent authority of the courts could be compromised, and with it, their ability to uphold the law and keep other powers in check at a time of rampant crime and corruption.
Around 100 million citizens were eligible to participate in Sunday's event, but only about 13% showed up to vote. Experts say the figures reflected confusion among voters who were overwhelmed by the large number of positions and candidates to choose from.
Víctor Manuel Alarcón Olguín, a research professor at the university UAM-Iztapalapa who focuses on political parties and elections, also faulted the way the process was designed. He said legislators 'did not provide the electoral authority with a sufficiently well-defined method, and the electoral authority had to resolve many of these technical problems on the fly in order, at least, to try to make this system work.'
Fareed explains how Mexico's controversial judicial elections could radically reshape the country's rule of law — for the worse. Among the nine projected winners in the Supreme Court race are three sitting justices who had been nominated by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the founder of Morena. Others include a former legal adviser to López Obrador, the current human rights prosecutor of the Attorney General's Office, and an indigenous lawyer who is expected to become the court's next president.
'Many of these people, at best, do not show an affiliation or such an obvious participation with the ruling party, but they do have very diverse interests or connections, or at least ideological or manifest affinities, let's say, in terms of their profiles and professional activities that place them in a circle very close to the government,' said Alarcón Olguín.
All nine candidates appeared in pamphlets that Morena members were accused of handing out to voters to suggest which candidates they should vote for. Election rules prohibit political parties from promoting or supporting judicial candidates.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, the leader of Morena, has tried to distance herself from the pamphlets, condemning their use and calling for an investigation into the matter.
Sunday's race marked the first time any country has held elections at every level of the judiciary. Almost 900 federal posts were in play, including all nine seats on the Supreme Court, as well as some 1,800 local positions in 19 states. Votes are still being counted across the country, with results expected to be announced gradually over the next week. A second vote for hundreds of other judicial positions will be held in 2027.
Sheinbaum labeled Sunday's election a success.
'In Mexico, voting is voluntary. It is not mandatory. There are countries where it is mandatory, but not here — here it is free, direct, universal, and secret. So, 13 million people decided to vote in an exercise for the judiciary. That is very good,' she said.
Lopez Obrador and his party approved the judicial election in September, arguing that a popular vote would help stem corruption and impunity within the courts.
But critics say Morena was seizing on its popularity to get like-minded justices elected, with the goal of passing through reforms that the previous, more-balanced courts had blocked. They also fear that the vote could be influenced by political actors and criminal groups.
Eight justices on the then-11-seat Supreme Court announced their resignations in October, declining to participate in Sunday's election. Most resignations are effective August 31, 2025, a day before the new court is set to begin.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Bloomberg
38 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Why The Trump Vs Musk Public Meltdown Matters
The breakup between the world's most powerful politician and the world's richest man is playing out in a manner befitting an era of hyperreality: with stunning speed, wild recriminations, and in public via television and their own social media platforms. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who just last week stood together in the Oval Office to proclaim their lasting friendship, traded barbs and insults in real time on Thursday. Proclamations of sadness, ingratitude and disappointment by the men soon devolved into an exchange of threats. Senior Editor Bill Faries joins Caroline Hepker and Tom Mackenzie on Bloomberg Radio to discuss what happened and why it mattered. (Source: Bloomberg)
Forbes
40 minutes ago
- Forbes
Trump-Musk Feud Fallout: DJT Fell 8% As Trump's Fortune Slides By $200M
Shares of Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of the president's Truth Social platform, fell by more than 8% on Thursday and wiped more than $200 million from President Donald Trump's net worth, as the president publicly clashed with billionaire Elon Musk—whose personal fortune nosedived nearly $27 billion amid a selloff in Tesla shares. Truth Social's parent company, Trump Media and Technology group's shares fell by 8% amid the ... More Musk-Trump feud. The stock price of Trump Media and Technology Group, which trades on Nasdaq under the DJT ticker, dropped by 8.04% on Thursday to $20.12. The social media company's shares began the day slightly in the red, but fell steeply in afternoon trading as Musk alleged, without evidence, that Trump's name was on the 'Epstein files,' and backed calls for his impeachment. Musk's side of the feud mostly played out on the billionaire's social media platform, X, while the president used his Truth Social platform to respond, where he threatened to 'terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.' Amid the intense social media feud, several users reported on Downdetector that the TMTG-owned platform was inaccessible to them, with the President's personal feed appearing blank with the message 'No Truths.' According to our estimates, President Donald Trump's net worth stood at $5.4 billion early on Friday, after dropping around $202 million amid Thursday's selloff. Despite this, the president's fortune remains more than double what it was at the start of 2024. In after-hours trading, Trump Media's shares briefly slumped to $19.30. However, signs of a potential truce between Musk and Trump have triggered a slight recovery in the premarket. In early trading on Friday, the social media company's share price went up around 1.15% to $20.35. Tesla has also seen a recovery, with the electric vehicle maker's stock price rising by 4.55% to just below $298.
Fast Company
an hour ago
- Fast Company
Supreme Court rewrites NEPA rules—changing the game for environmental reviews
Getting federal approval for permits to build bridges, wind farms, highways, and other major infrastructure projects has long been a complicated and time-consuming process. Despite growing calls from both parties for Congress and federal agencies to reform that process, there had been few significant revisions —until now. In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed a big part of the game. Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewer's perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permitting—the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA. Taking a big-picture look NEPA requires federal agencies to document and describe the environmental effects of any proposed action, including construction of oil pipelines, renewable energy, and other infrastructure projects. Only after completing that work can the agency make a final decision to approve or deny the project. These reports must evaluate direct effects, such as the destruction of habitat to make way for a new highway, and indirect effects, such as the air pollution from cars using the highway after it is built. Decades of litigation about the scope of indirect effects have widened the required evaluation. As I explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requests—for a glass of milk, a napkin, and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls, and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce. The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects courts would require them to evaluate. In recent litigation, the question in particular has been how broad a range of effects on and from climate change could be linked to any one specific project and therefore require evaluation. With the court's ruling, federal agencies' days of uncertainty are over. Biggest NEPA case in decades On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court (minus Justice Neil Gorsuch, who had recused himself) decided the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the first major NEPA dispute before the court in 20 years. At issue was an 85-mile rail line a group of developers proposed to build in Utah to connect oil wells to the interstate rail network and from there transport waxy crude oil to refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere. The federal Surface Transportation Board reviewed the environmental effects and approved the required license in 2021. The report was 637 pages long, with more than 3,000 pages of appendices containing additional information. It acknowledged but did not give a detailed assessment of the indirect 'upstream' effects of constructing the rail line—such as spurring new oil drilling—and the indirect 'downstream' effects of the ultimate use of the waxy oil in places as far-flung as Louisiana. In February 2022, Eagle County, Colorado, through which trains coming from the new railway would pass, along with the Center for Biological Diversity appealed that decision in federal court, arguing that the board had failed to properly explain why it did not assess those effects. Therefore, the county argued, the report was incomplete and the board license should be vacated. In August 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed and held that the agency had failed to adequately explain why it could not employ 'some degree of forecasting' to identify those impacts and that the board could prevent those effects by exercising its authority to deny the license. The railway developers appealed to the Supreme Court, asking whether NEPA requires a federal agency to look beyond the action being proposed to evaluate indirect effects outside its own jurisdiction. A resounding declaration Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered a ringing, table-pounding lecture about courts run amok. Kavanaugh did not stop to provide specific support for each admonition, describing NEPA as a ' legislative acorn ' that has 'grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development.' He bemoaned the 'delay upon delay' NEPA imposes on projects as so complicated that it bordered 'on the Kafkaesque.' In his view, 'NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents.' He called for 'a course correction . . . to bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with the statutory text and common sense.' His opinion reset the course in three ways. First, despite the Supreme Court having recently reduced the deference courts must give to federal agency decisions in other contexts, Kavanaugh wrote that courts should give agencies strong deference when reviewing an agency's NEPA effects analyses. Because these assessments are 'fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry . . . (c)ourts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.' Second, Kavanaugh crafted a new rule saying that the review of one project did not need to consider the potential indirect effects of other related projects it could foreseeably induce, such as the rail line encouraging more drilling for oil. This limitation is especially relevant, Kavanaugh emphasized, when the effects are from projects over which the reviewing agency does not have jurisdiction. That applied in this case, because the board does not regulate oil wells or oil drilling. And third, Kavanaugh created something like a 'no harm, no foul' rule, under which 'even if an [environmental impact statement] falls short in some respects, that deficiency may not necessarily require a court to vacate the agency's ultimate approval of a project.' The strong implication is that courts should not overturn an agency decision unless its NEPA assessment has a serious flaw. The upshot for the project at hand was that the Supreme Court deferred to the board's decision that it could not reliably predict the rail line's effects on oil drilling or use of the oil transported. And the fact that the agency had no regulatory power over those separate issues reinforced the idea that those concerns were outside the scope of the board's required review. A split court Although Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that she would have reached the same end result and upheld the agency permit, her proposed test is far narrower. By her reading, the federal law creating the Surface Transportation Board restricted it from considering the broader indirect effects of the rail line. But her finding would be relevant only for any federal agencies whose governing statutes were similarly restrictive. By contrast, Kavanaugh's 'course correction' applies to judicial review of NEPA findings for all federal agencies. Though the full effects remain to be seen, this decision significantly changes the legal landscape of environmental reviews of major projects. Agencies will have more latitude to shorten the causal chain of indirect effects they consider, and to exclude them entirely if they flow from separate projects beyond the agency's regulatory control. Now, for example, if a federal agency is considering an application to build a new natural gas power plant, the review must still include its direct greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on the climate. But emissions that could result from additional gas extraction and transportation projects to fuel the power plant, and any climate effects from whatever the produced electricity is used for, are now clearly outside the agency's required review. And if the agency voluntarily decided to consider any of those effects, courts would have to defer to its analysis, and any minor deficiencies would be inconsequential.
