Understanding the changing relationship between the President and the Supreme Court in Mexico
By: Fsi Student Programs
Tags: Mexico, Fsi Students, Stanford, Research

About the author: Rolando Garcia-Miron is a recipient of an FSI small research grant, which he used to conduct research in Mexico City. He is currently JSD candidate at Stanford Law School.

After a landslide victory in the election that had taken place a few months earlier, on December 1st, 2018 Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the President of Mexico. His arrival to the presidency marked a significant change in the political landscape of Mexico. For the first time since 1997, the political party of the President had a majority of the seats in both houses of Congress. Additionally, López Obrador arrived to the presidency after receiving more than fifty percent of the votes, something that no other presidential candidate had achieved in over two decades. Furthermore, López Obrador’s political party, MORENA, also won an important number of elections at the local level, further expanding his political power.

López Obrador, a charismatic leader with a populist discourse, arrived to the presidency with an ambitious reform agenda. From the first days of his administration, López Obrador made it clear that he planned to use his legislative majority and his broad public support to transform Mexico’s institutions and public life. It didn’t take long after the President enacted his first policies for the first legal challenges to be filed in federal courts, placing the Mexican Federal Judiciary, and in particular the Supreme Court, in the complicated position of evaluating the legality and constitutionality of the new President’s agenda. Given his overwhelming force in Congress and in many of the local governments, the Supreme Court seems to be the only political institution capable of reviewing and potentially opposing the actions of the Executive.

Before the arrival of President López Obrador, the fragmentation of political power that characterized the Mexican political system for over two decades created a space for the Supreme Court to slowly emerge as a legitimate and effective check on government action. This fragmentation of political power dramatically changed after the 2018 election, and today there are already some signs that this new distribution of political forces in the country is transforming the traditional relationship between the Executive and the Supreme Court. At this point it is still unclear what will be the effect on the role of the Supreme Court of the disappearance of the fragmentation of political power that had marked the previous decades.

With the support of FSI, I had the opportunity to travel to Mexico City and conduct fieldwork to study how it is that the new political reality of the country is transforming the traditional relationship between the President and the Supreme Court. During my time in Mexico City I conducted interviews with some of the most important stakeholders and experts on this area, who shared with me their views and opinions. These conversations allowed me to acquire a deep understanding of the many different ways in which these changes are happening and the possible effects that this new political reality could have on the role that the Supreme Court has in the Mexican political system.

The information that I collected during my fieldwork in Mexico City is at the center of a paper that I will be publishing in the upcoming months.