MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was effusive. “Marvelous, impressive “ she told reporters Monday. “Extraordinary. … A great success.”
The superlatives kept coming about Sunday’s historic judicial elections — which Sheinbaum championed — but the president could not conceal a harsh reality: Only about 13% of 100 million eligible voters cast ballots in a vote that the president had labeled a key component of the ruling party’s ongoing “transformation” of Mexican society. She and her allies had spent weeks urging people to vote.
No one expected that Sunday’s polling — which didn’t include contenders for any national or statewide legislative posts — would approach the 61% turnout of last year’s national elections. Sheinbaum won a landslide victory last year, and her Morena political bloc swept to huge majorities in both houses of Congress and in state houses and towns across the country.
The turnout was more disappointing than even the the lowest pre-election turnout estimates of about 15%. Some election advocates had optimistically predicted as many as one-third of voters would make it to the polls.
“Everything can be perfected,” the president conceded.
The lack of participation, experts said, can be attributed to many factors: it was an off-year election; the balloting process was new and extremely convoluted; the vast majority of more than 7,000 contenders for 881 federal judge positions — and for another 1,800 state jurist posts — were unknown.
The election, while the brainchild of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — the founder of Morena and the mentor of Sheinbaum — was ostensibly nonpartisan. Would-be judges were not identified by political affiliation and were banned from receiving party funds. There were no massive rallies or advertisement blitzes in a contest that largely played out on social media.
And it was the first time that Mexico had ever voted for judges, who have historically been appointed by expert panels or, in the case of the Supreme Court, the president. Mexico becomes the first nation in the world with an all-elected judiciary.
“The task was a very time-intensive one for voters, who had to learn about an outrageous number of candidates,” said Kenneth F. Greene, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. “Nobody could possibly learn about all of them.”
Nonetheless, many political observers deemed Sunday’s low turnout an embarrassing setback for a party that had seemed near invincible in its extraordinary march to power since its emergence less than a decade ago.
Government opponents reveled in a rare opportunity to mock Morena’s legendary electoral prowess, labeling the vote “Black Sunday,” and the end of judicial independence and of Mexico’s system of checks and balances.
“This was a festival of voter fraud, and they dare to say that the people rule,” Jorge Romero, national leader of the center-right National Action Party, said at a news conference that featured images of empty voting booths and testimonies from citizens who didn’t know which candidates to vote for.
Writing in Reforma newspaper, columnist Denise Dresser archly compared the election to a long-planned gala that no one attends.
“They rolled out the carpet, sent the invitations, mounted the chairs, designed the menu, [and] contracted with mariachis,” Dresser wrote. “And, at the end, they were alone.”
Will all the complaints and the low turnout make any difference in the ultimate makeup of the judiciary? Many experts say no — despite the opposition’s vow to file a complaint with the Organization of American States, a move that may be more symbolic than substantial.
Final results won’t be known for a week or two. But at the end, it seems likely that the official count will stand, and pro-Morena judges will take their seats in a system that Sheinbaum has assailed as corrupt and filled with nepotism.
“It was always going to reinforce Morena and give President Sheinbaum even more power than she already has,” said Greene, who was in Mexico City to observe the voting process. “My strong guess is that Sheinbaum now dominates all three branches of government and is essentially able to pass whatever laws and constitutional reforms she wants. We’re seeing a tremendous concentration of power in the presidency.”
The most closely watched race is for the makeup of the new Supreme Court, which will have both fewer judges— nine, instead of the current 11 — and less authority to challenge legislative and presidential decisions. Only three sitting members opted to run for office. All three were appointees of López Obrador, who repeatedly clashed with the justices about his strong-arm efforts to reform electoral law and other initiatives.
Whether Mexico’s new judges will be an improvement over the current judiciary remains to be seen. Many Mexicans clearly agree with the president’s assertions that Mexico’s judicial system was in need of an overhaul.
But judges are only part of a justice system that has many flaws. Untouched in the judicial reform were other entities, notably district attorney’s offices and local police, both notoriously corrupt.
Both Sheinbaum and her predecessor have turned to the National Guard as the nation’s go-to law enforcement agency. But National Guard troops have themselves been implicated in various recent scandals, including killing civilians and trafficking in black-market gasoline.
The election “was a political humiliation,” wrote Alejandro Monsivais-Carrillo, a political scientist at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, on X. “But it doesn’t matter much: Party control of public powers advances without retreat.”
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.
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