( Spanish) — Some 200,000 people marched this Sunday in Mexico City, and thousands more in some thirty cities in the country in what the organizers of the mobilization called the defense of the National Electoral Institute (INE) before the electoral reform initiative proposed by the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The opposition claims that the initiative, sent by the president to the Chamber of Deputies last April, is a strategy to eliminate the country’s autonomous electoral body. According to the organizers, the protest would have brought together a million people.
The national demonstration was called by some 50 civil organizations, political parties and opposition legislators. López Obrador’s reform initiative proposes a transformation of the INE, the institution in charge, among other tasks, of organizing elections throughout the country.
The march in Mexico City started from the emblematic Angel of Independence and ended at the Monument to the Revolution.
According to the Secretary of Government of the Mexican capital, Martí Batres – a member of Morena, López Obrador’s party – between 10,000 and 12,000 people attended the demonstration in Mexico City.
At the Monument to the Revolution, José Woldenberg, the first president of the extinct Federal Electoral Institute – the body that preceded the INE – and the only speaker at the protest, called for defending the country’s electoral system in the face of what he described as the objective of the ruling party to align the electoral bodies to the will of the Government.
“No to the pretense of aligning the electoral bodies to the will of the Government, not to authoritarianism. Yes to democracy; yes to a democratic Mexico,” Woldenberg said during his speech.
The reform proposes, among other points, a cut in the budget of the INE and of the political parties, in addition to the fact that the advisers of the Institute and the electoral magistrates are chosen by popular vote and not by designation by legislators. Likewise, it proposes changing the name of the organization to the National Institute of Elections and Consultations.
Two days before the protests, the Chamber of Deputies approved the 2023 budget, in which resources are reduced for autonomous bodies in Mexico, including the INE, whose budget will be reduced by some 4,475 million pesos (about US$ 230 million).