The head of Mexico’s National Electoral Institute stepped down on Monday amid accusations of corruption, conflict of interest and influence peddling, raising concerns over the credibility of the agency responsible for safeguarding the country’s elections ahead of a major vote next year.
The accusations against Guadalupe Taddei Zavala center on a supposed procurement scheme in which companies linked to a businessman with close ties to her secured lucrative contracts to supply electoral materials to the agency and local election officials.
She is the first president in the electoral watchdog’s history to resign.
The leadership shake-up comes as Mexico prepares for a sweeping midterm election next June, when voters will choose officials for more than 20,000 public posts across federal, state and municipal levels, including all 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, 17 governorships and thousands of state and municipal positions.
The vote will be a major test for President Claudia Sheinbaum and her governing Morena party, which holds supermajorities in both chambers of Congress with its allies and controls about three-quarters of the country’s 32 states.
On Monday, Ms. Sheinbaum noted Ms. Taddei’s decision and called for a further investigation into the accusations.
“I think she is making the right decision by stepping aside,” Ms. Sheinbaum said during her daily news conference. “And there can be no allegations, no shadows of corruption, hanging over the electoral institution.”
Ms. Taddei’s resignation comes days after Mexico’s superior audit office — the nation’s top auditing and oversight authority — announced that it had opened an investigation based on irregularities in contracts awarded by the watchdog as well as indications of potential conflict of interests, collusion and diversion of funds, according to a public statement.
The scandal erupted this month after investigative reports revealed close personal ties between Ms. Taddei’s family and the businessman José Alfredo Hernández Casillas, whose network of companies had received hundreds of millions of pesos in electoral agency contracts.
Auditors said they were looking into whether companies coordinated bids to create the appearance of competition while public money was being channeled through intermediary firms with few employees. Investigators are also examining the hiring of some of these companies’ former employees and associates for administrative and technical positions within the electoral agency.
Ms. Taddei, who took over the electoral agency, known as the I.N.E., in 2023, has denied wrongdoing and defended the legality of the appointments. On Sunday, she said she would submit her resignation to Congress on Monday after “profound reflection,” citing the need to protect the agency’s credibility ahead of the upcoming elections.
“This decision reflects my conviction that protecting the institute and allowing it to continue fulfilling its constitutional mission must always take precedence over any short-term or personal interests,” she said in a public statement, adding that her departure did not impede anyone to investigate or clarify any potential wrongdoing.
“Individuals come and go. Institutions endure. Mexican democracy must move forward,” she added.
The controversy deepened on Friday, after a local news outlet released a video purportedly showing one of Ms. Taddei’s sons, Jorge Francisco Piñeda Taddei, and Mr. Hernández, the businessman at the center of the incident, drinking Champagne inside a luxury hotel room in Paris. The footage followed several other news reports documenting Mr. Hernández’s close ties to Ms. Taddei and contracts awarded to companies linked to him.
In a message posted on social media, Ricardo Monreal, a Mexican lawmaker who leads Ms. Sheinbaum’s coalition in Congress and is an influential political figure within Morena, said the lower Chamber of Deputies would call for applications to select a new president of the institute. A technical committee will then review aspiring candidates and elect the next head by a two-thirds majority vote, a process that can take about a month.
The electoral agency’s councilors will meet this week to choose an interim president from among their ranks.
Luis Carlos Ugalde, a political analyst who led the electoral agency from 2003 to 2007, said Ms. Taddei’s resignation came at a critical moment, amid what he described as “democratic backsliding” and growing concerns over the organization’s independence. Opposition parties and analysts have accused some electoral councilors appointed under Morena of favoring the governing party.
The 2027 elections “will test whether Morena can continue expanding its electoral dominance or whether its grip on power will begin to weaken,” he said, helping determine the course of the second half of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term. “Whoever becomes the next president of the I.N.E. could help restore the institution’s independence and impartiality, or allow it to remain politically captured and continue operating in ways that benefit the ruling party.”
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