It is necessary that minorities have space in Congress

The electoral reform announced by President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo would imply "a return to a single party" and would set the country back several decades, Germán Pérez Fernández del Castillo and Víctor Alarcón Olguín agreed.

"It's very clear; it's a return to a single party, to the 1940s, because the 1946 law is actually similar to the current proposal because there were no plurinominal (legislators) and any representation was nullified by the majority," said Pérez Fernández del Castillo, a UNAM expert on politics and elections.

"From 1946 to the present, reforms and efforts have been made, culminating in a competitive party system that allowed for alternation in power and meant the executive branch couldn't do whatever it wanted like a king, but instead had to negotiate with the various political forces."

For Alarcón Olguín, a UAM expert on political parties, the changes that the federal government is expected to promote would mean “returning to a system that takes us back even to the design we had in 1964 (…) Having only majority (federal) deputies would really seem like a huge step backwards to me.”

“Returning to the days of not only a hegemonic, almost single party, and I even believe that's why the concern is focused not only on the opposition parties, but even on the two parties that make up the current governing coalition, the PT and the PVEM, gives an idea of what could be an unintended effect of currently having a system so lacking in plurality.”

“Our current system, which has lasted just over 30 years, has allowed for a flux of representation.”

Proposals

Both experts spoke out against the elimination of the 200 federal deputies and 32 senators with proportional representation; reducing public funding for political parties; and electing electoral councilors by popular vote, as was done for the first time in history last June with electoral magistrates.

Pérez Fernández del Castillo proposed that the Chamber of Deputies be composed of 250 legislators with a relative majority, directly elected at the polls, and an equal number of plurinominal representatives in order to achieve "real representation of the citizens' will" in the Congress of the Union.

"It's not a question of strengthening political parties; that was a fallacious argument of the 1963 reform. Representation must be real."

Alarcón Olguín considered that the current number and composition of federal deputies (300 single-member constituencies and 200 multi-member constituencies) and senators (96 single-member constituencies and 32 multi-member constituencies) would not have to be modified with the proposed reform, but only the formula for assigning multi-member constituencies.

"What really needs to be reviewed is the formula for integrating the majority and minority, which is what caused the controversy over over- and underrepresentation. It's a mathematical formula, but that has to do with another aspect of the electoral system design that has remained in place since 1996. That's the other issue: the famous eight percentage points (governability clause) that one party is allowed over another," he explained.

It's worth mentioning that with the new composition of the Union Congress in September 2024, opposition parties accused Morena and its allies of being overrepresented because the calculations for the allocation of plurinominal legislators are made by party and not by coalition, a reform that, the ruling party accused, was promoted by the PAN in 2008.

The "party deputies," introduced with the 1964 electoral reform, are the precursor to the proportional representation or plurinominal federal deputies, which emerged with the 1977 electoral reform. Since then, the Lower House has been composed of 300 majority deputies and 100 pluri-members. Legal changes in 1988 increased the number of pluri-members to 200, and since 1996, the Congress of the Union has been composed of 300 majority federal deputies and 200 plurinominal representatives, and the Upper House of 96 majority senators and 32 pluri-members.

Expensive democracy

Regarding the possibility of halving public funding for political parties, the UNAM expert said that this would leave them "practically defenseless (...) Democracy is expensive and must be expensive."

"With the electoral reform of 1977, political parties became entities of public interest, and this enabled public financing."

On this topic, the UAM academic warned that if public funding is limited, political parties will have very little opportunity to communicate or develop.

“That has been the value, precisely, of public financing. That's why the process initiated in 1977 was driven to provide greater conditions of equity. Rather, the issue is the opposite: how can we strengthen the value of public financing, but with proper oversight, and thereby create protections so that electoral campaigns are not infiltrated by organized crime or other actors who may illegally finance or even misappropriate other actors from the public space, so that governors and legislators divert resources, creating conditions of competition with a loaded dice.”