Without pluris, who will represent minorities?

To save money and simplify the electoral system, President Claudia Sheinbaum proposes eliminating the proportional representation of representatives. However, her proposal would fundamentally change the composition of the Chamber of Deputies and give Morena even more power.

Plurinominal elections emerged in 1963, when "party deputies" were created to represent minorities and the opposition, which until then had barely had a symbolic presence. All seats were won by relative majority, giving the PRI complete control of the Chamber. With the reform, the PAN and the now-defunct PPS and PARM (both PRI stooges) were able to enter Congress without winning districts.

The 1977 political reform replaced party representatives with proportional representation: 100 plurinominal representatives, which was increased to 200 in 1986. Since then, almost all parties have benefited: some grew, others survived, and several still managed to disappear. In recent decades, some parties have taken advantage of this opportunity better than others.

Morena, the PT, the PVEM, the MC, and the PAN have all known how to exploit the mechanism. Morena debuted in 2015 with 25 plurinominal elections, placing it as the third-largest force, and, once in power, has used them to strengthen majorities and place key cadres without subjecting them to a citizen vote. The PT has relied on them to stay alive; for the PVEM, which rarely wins more than a dozen districts, the plurinominal elections are its main source of seats; MC expanded its national presence thanks to them; and the PAN, for decades, exploited them to multiply its constituency with few district victories, allowing it to grow as an opposition and win the presidency in 2000. The big loser has been the PRI, which went from dominating the system to becoming a minor party.

To push her proposal, the president is relying—without saying so—on the discrediting of the pluris, who are typically distinguished leaders or activists who win a seat without campaigning and then occupy key positions in the Chamber. Preventing this doesn't require eliminating them, but rather reforming Article 54 of the Constitution and the Organic Law of Congress so that the presidencies of the Board of Directors, the Political Coordination Board, and the legislative committees are held only by deputies with a relative majority.

Would things change if the plurinominal deputies were eliminated? Not much, if we analyze the results of the most recent election. If only deputies had been elected by relative majority in 2024, the Chamber would have been as follows: Morena, 176 instead of 253; PAN, 31 instead of 71; PRI, 11 instead of 37; PVEM, 44 instead of 62; PT, 36 instead of 49; and MC, 1 instead of 27. With those numbers, Morena and its allies would have an absolute majority to approve constitutional reforms without having to negotiate with the opposition.

However, eliminating the pluris would mean leaving millions of citizens who wouldn't vote for the dominant party without representation, and Mexico would return to the era of a single-party-controlled chamber. It wouldn't be just any return: it would occur in a country with fewer checks and balances and balances, with the autonomy of electoral institutions in question, where only the PAN and the PRI would likely survive as opposition parties, although no one can say for how much longer.

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