Last week, on the 108th anniversary of the Mexican Constitution, President Claudia Sheinbaum submitted two constitutional reforms to Congress to eliminate reelection and nepotism in all public offices.
As of today, consecutive reelection is only forbidden for the presidency and state governors.
While Sheinbaum did not give further details about the proposals, she said that one would entail “the non-reelection to any elected office.”
The second one, she announced, mandates “that no family member may immediately succeed another in the case of an elected position” to prevent nepotism.
These initiatives follow a series of other legal reforms that began one year ago, when former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented an ambitious package of 20 proposals, including eight constitutional amendments and two legal reforms. Nearly half have already been approved.
From Querétaro, where Mexico’s Constitution was signed in 1917, Sheinbaum celebrated the progress of those initiatives “to recover and expand the nationalist sense of the 1917 Constitution.”
En Querétaro, conmemoramos 108 años de nuestra Constitución. Hoy enviamos al Congreso dos reformas: no reelección y no al nepotismo. Somos una nación libre y soberana; reafirmamos: cooperación, sí; subordinación, no. pic.twitter.com/KPwQvkgGsK
— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) February 6, 2025
Speaking at Querétaro’s Teatro de la República, Sheinbaum claimed that during the so-called “neoliberal period” from 1982 to 2018, the Constitution lost its social and nationalist vision. She said that nearly 500 reforms led to the privatization of public assets and natural resources, subordinating the country’s development to external interests and dismantling a significant portion of the welfare state.
The new proposals follow other initiatives like the controversial judicial reform approved days before López Obrador left office in September 2024, which subjects the election of judges and magistrates to a public vote and reduces the number of Supreme Court ministers from 11 to 9.
Other López Obrador proposals included restoring Mexico’s passenger rail system, guaranteeing government pensions for seniors and disabled Mexicans and reestablishing Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) as public companies, among others.
With reports from EFE and El Sol de México
