Reforms include capping the resources allocated to local deputies & municipal councilors; expanding public consultations to include political party budgets; and holding recall elections in the third or fourth year of the Presidential term.
The socialist party’s leader recalled the democratic spaces that the left managed to conquer with the 1977 & 1996 reforms, a “fruit of countless struggles, repressions, imprisonments, disappearances and even armed uprisings.”
Mexico’s upcoming electoral reform should ensure that the internal functioning of political parties is genuinely democratic, to transform them into organizations which promote and support social struggles to resolve common problems.
Democratization is always an unfinished and perfectible process: the new electoral reform allows us to look back at past demands to help formulating new forms of political representation that allow for the democratic exercise of majorities and guarantee effective conditions for the contestation of power.