• México
• Politics

Mexico City, Aug 23 (EFE). –

Mexico’s president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum will have the support of 83 senators in the upper house, leaving her two seats short of the two-thirds qualified majority that would allow her to reform the Constitution without negotiating with the opposition, the National Electoral Institute (INE) confirmed Friday.

The official party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), will have 60 seats in the Senate.

Its electoral allies, the Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) and the Labor Party (PT), will have 14 and 9 seats respectively, for a total of 83, short of the 85 needed for a qualified majority.

In Mexico, there are three types of seats in the Legislative Assembly: relative majority (candidates who won the elections), first minority (those who came second in the elections; used only in the Senate), and proportional representation (also known as plurinominal).

The plurinominal members are chosen by the leadership of their respective parties. They do not have to campaign, appear on the ballot, or promote the popular vote to be part of either chamber.

The official coalition won 62 of the 96 senatorial seats elected by direct vote, and the remaining 21 were awarded by proportional representation.

Morena and its allied parties also won 256 of the 300 seats in the lower house by direct vote; the INE confirmed 108 plurinominal seats, giving them 364 of the 500 seats, meaning they will be able to reform the Constitution in the Chamber of Deputies.

However, the reform may still fail in the upper house, where the opposition parties have 45 senators: 22 from the National Action Party (PAN), 16 from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), two from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and five from the Citizens’ Movement (MC), which will force the governing coalition to negotiate in the Senate.

There is a possibility that the government will be able to pass its reforms if it convinces three senators from opposition parties to vote favorably or get legislators to change parties, which is not unprecedented in Mexican political history.

During the seat distribution session, the representative of the Citizens’ Movement, Senator Dante Delgado criticized the INE’s results.

“We warn that with the distribution of seats and the seats defended by the government, the more than six and a half million Mexicans who voted for our political force are being made invisible. They are punishing only and exclusively the Citizens’ Movement,” the senator affirmed.

Delgado pointed out that his party will receive only 4% of the final distribution of seats in the Senate, despite having received about 11% of the votes in the elections.

In response to the criticism and accusations of overrepresentation made by the Mexican opposition, the president of the INE, Guadalupe Taddei, was blunt.

“It is unacceptable to put the INE in a false dilemma, the Constitution is clear and precise (…) to ask the Institute to apply this formula in any other way is unthinkable,” said Taddei, who defended the resolution. EFE

mwp/mcd