Everyone wins, even when they lose
The little-explored detail is that all parties will have a “gain” in seats, but with the victory of Morena and its allies, the distribution eclipses the opposition’s gain, since it will not be enough for the minority parties to influence the approval of laws.
Former counselor of the Federal District Electoral Institute (IEDF) and journalist Eduardo Huchim explains that the application of the Constitution should be as always, not subject to the circumstances of who wins or loses.
He stressed that the opposition will have an increase in deputies, “the comparison of what they won by relative majority and what they will have in proportional representation is scandalous.”
With the figures for multi-member deputies that the INE is preparing to assign on Friday, it is clear that “the PAN won 32 districts and they are given an additional 40, that is 125% more than what they won at the polls.
“And in the case of the PRI, they are given 288%. They won nine districts and they are given 26 more. That is a gain. And the most notable case for me is that of Movimiento Ciudadano, which won one district and they are given 26 for a total of 27! In other words, they only won one district and they are still complaining,” says the analyst.
Taking an opposite position, political scientist Rodrigo Salazar Elena, adjunct research professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), believes that overrepresentation in itself “is not a constitutional problem” since it is foreseen and regulated.
The problem is that they have used “tricks” to benefit from this mechanism by which the parties with the fewest votes can access Congress, and apply them to a majority coalition.
“Unlike the German electoral system, which is also mixed, with majority and proportional representation, the way in which seats are distributed is such that the percentage of votes corresponds to the percentage of seats in the deputies almost perfectly. But this is not the case in Mexico,” he explains.
However, the law does provide for two mechanisms to avoid excessive over-representation: “one is that no political party has an over-representation greater than 8% and the other is that none has more than 300 deputies.”
“The problem is that Morena with its allies the PT and the PVEM, in a trick that the Green Party developed with its former ally the PRI before, but now took its know-how to their new alliance with Morena. What they did was a coalition contract.”
In that “contract” in single-member districts where it was foreseeable that Morena would win, the victory in those districts was defined as a victory for the Green Party or the PT, so now there was no transfer of votes, but of victories,” explains the political scientist from Flacso.
For this reason, he considers that an interpretation of the Constitution is valid which considers that the main objective of proportional representation and its allocation mechanism is to balance the political forces in Congress, but that so many are not allocated so that none of them can reform the Constitution on their own.
“The objective of this limitation was to prevent excessive over-representation and to ensure that no political group could reform the Constitution on its own. That was always the objective. If this Coalition acts in unison, I believe that one interpretation is to say that the coalition, for the purposes of its ability to change the Constitution, should be considered a political force,” he said.
