President of Mexico


The president of Mexico, officially the president of the United Mexican States, is the head of state and head of government of Mexico. Under the Constitution of Mexico, the president heads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander in chief of the Mexican Armed Forces. The office, which was first established by the federal Constitution of 1824, is currently held by Claudia Sheinbaum, who was sworn in on October 1, 2024. The office of the president is considered to be revolutionary, in the sense that the powers of office are derived from the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917. Another legacy of the Mexican Revolution is the Constitution's ban on re-election. Mexican presidents are limited to a single six-year term, called a sexenio. No one who has held the post, even on a caretaker basis, is allowed to run or serve again. The constitution and the office of the president closely follow the presidential system of government.

Requirements to hold office

Chapter III of Title III of the Constitution deals with the executive branch of government and sets forth the powers of the president, as well as the qualifications for the office. The president is vested with the "Supreme Executive Power of the Union".
To be eligible to serve as president, Article 82 of the Constitution specifies that the following requirements must be met:
  • Be a natural-born citizen of Mexico able to exercise full citizenship rights, with at least one parent who is a natural-born citizen of Mexico.
  • Be a resident of Mexico for at least twenty years.
  • Be at least thirty-five years of age at the time of the election.
  • Be a resident of Mexico for the entire year prior to the election.
  • Not be an official or minister of any church or religious denomination.
  • Not be in active military service during the six months prior to the election.
  • Not be a secretary of state or under-secretary of state, attorney general, governor of a state, or head of the government of Mexico City, unless "separated from the post" at least six months prior to the election.
  • Not have been president already, even in a provisional capacity.
The ban on any sort of presidential re-election dates back to the aftermath of the Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution, which erupted after Porfirio Díaz's fraudulent victory on his seventh re-election in a row. It is so entrenched in Mexican politics that it has remained in place even as it was relaxed for other offices. In 2014, the constitution was amended to allow city mayors, congresspeople and senators to run for a second consecutive term. Previously, deputies and senators were barred from successive re-election. The president remains barred from even non-consecutive reelection.
The Constitution does not establish formal academic qualifications to serve as president. Most presidents during the 19th and early 20th centuries had careers in one of two fields: the armed forces or the law. President Manuel Ávila Camacho was the last president to have been a career military officer. Most of his successors have been lawyers; in fact, all the presidents between 1958 and 1988 graduated from law school. Presidents Salinas and Zedillo were both trained as economists. Since the democratic transition, presidents have a wider academic background. Although Presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto were both lawyers, President Fox studied business administration, Andrés Manuel López Obrador studied political sciences and current president Claudia Sheinbaum studied physics.

Elections

The presidential term was set at four years from 1821 to 1904, when President Porfirio Díaz extended it to six years for the first time in Mexico's history, and then again from 1917 to 1928 after a new constitution reversed the change made by Díaz in 1904.
Finally, the presidential term was set at six years in 1928 and has remained unchanged since then. The president is elected by direct, popular, universal suffrage. Whoever wins a simple plurality of the national vote is elected; there is no runoff election.
The former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected in 2018 with a modern-era record of 53% of the popular vote in 2018. The previous president, Enrique Peña Nieto won 38% of the popular vote in 2012. Former president Felipe Calderón won with 36.38% of the votes in the 2006 general election, finishing only 0.56% above his nearest rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. In 2000, former president Vicente Fox was elected with a plurality of 43% of the popular vote, Ernesto Zedillo won 48.7% of the vote in 1994, and his predecessor Carlos Salinas won with a majority of 50.4% in the 1988 election.
After the fall of dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910 following the Mexican Revolution, the government was unstable until 1929, when all the revolutionary leaders united in one political party: the National Revolutionary Party, which later changed its name to the Party of the Mexican Revolution and is now the Institutional Revolutionary Party. From then, the PRI ruled Mexico as a virtual one-party state until 1989, when Ernesto Ruffo Appel was elected the first state governor from an opposition party.
Toward the end of their term, the incumbent president, in consultation with party leaders, selected the PRI's candidate in the next election in a procedure known as el dedazo. Until 1988, the PRI's candidate was virtually assured of election, winning by margins well over 70 percent of the vote.
In 1988, the PRI ruptured and the dissidents formed the National Democratic Front with rival center-left parties. Discontent with the PRI, and the popularity of the Front's candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas led to worries that PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari would not come close to a majority, and might actually be defeated. While the votes were being counted, the tabulation system mysteriously shut down. The government declared Salinas the winner, leading to allegations of electoral fraud.
The 1997 federal congressional election saw the first opposition Chamber of Deputies ever, and the 2000 elections saw Vicente Fox of a PAN/PVEM alliance become the first opposition candidate to win an election since 1911. This historical defeat was accepted on election night by the PRI in the voice of President Zedillo; while this calmed fears of violence, it also fueled questions about the role of the president in the electoral process and to whom the responsibility of conceding defeat should fall in a democratic election.

President-elect

After a presidential election, political parties may issue challenges to the election. These challenges are heard by the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power; after it has heard and ruled on them, the tribunal must either declare the election invalid or certify the results of the elections in accordance to their rulings. Once the tribunal declares the election valid, it issues a Constancia de Mayoría to the candidate who obtained a plurality. That candidate then becomes president-elect. The final decision is made in September, two months after the election.

Powers

The 1917 Constitution borrowed heavily from the Constitution of the United States, providing for a clear separation of powers while giving the president wider powers than their American counterpart.
For the first 71 years after the enactment of the 1917 Constitution, the president exercised nearly absolute control over the country. Much of this power came from the de facto monopoly status of the PRI. As mentioned above, they effectively chose their successor as president by personally nominating the PRI's candidate in the next election. In addition, the unwritten rules of the PRI allowed them to designate party officials and candidates all the way down to the local level. They thus had an important influence over the political life of the country. This and their constitutional powers made some political commentators describe the president as a six-year dictator, and to call this system an "imperial presidency". The situation remained largely unchanged until the early 1980s when a grave economic crisis created discomfort both in the population and inside the party, and the president's power was no longer absolute but still impressive.
An important characteristic of this system is that the new president was effectively chosen by the old one but once they assumed power, the old one lost all power and influence. In fact, tradition called for the incumbent president to fade into the background during the campaign to elect their successor. This renewed command helped maintain party discipline and avoided the stagnation associated with a single person holding power for decades, prompting Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to call Mexico's political system "the perfect dictatorship" since the president's powers were cloaked by democratic practice.
With the democratic reforms of recent years and fairer elections, the president's powers have been limited in fact as well as in name. Vargas Llosa, during the Fox administration, called this new system "The Imperfect Democracy". The current rights and powers of the president of Mexico are established, limited and enumerated by Article 89 of the Constitution which include the following:
  • Promulgate and execute the laws enacted by Congress, providing in the administrative sphere to its exact observance;
  • Appoint and remove freely the Secretaries of State, remove the ambassadors, consuls general and senior employees of the Treasury, appoint and remove freely all other employees of the Union whose appointment or removal is not otherwise in the Constitution or in laws;
  • Appoint, with Senate approval, ambassadors, consuls general, superior employees of the Treasury and members of collegial bodies of regulation in telecommunications, energy and economic competition;
  • Appoint, with the approval of the Senate, the colonels and general and flag officers of the Army, Navy and Air Force;
  • Preserve national security, under the terms of the respective law, and have all of the permanent Armed Forces i.e. Army, Navy and Air Force for internal security and external defense of the Federation;
  • Having the National Guard to the same duties and responsibilities, in the terms that prevent Section IV of Article 76;
  • Declare war on behalf of the United Mexican States with consent from the Congress of the Union;
  • Intervene in the appointment of the Attorney General of the Republic and delete it, in terms of the provisions of Article 102, Section A, of this Constitution;
  • Conduct foreign policy and conclude international treaties and finish, denounce, suspend, modify, amend, remove reservations and issuing interpretative statements thereon, and submitting to the approval of the Senate. In conducting such a policy, the Chief Executive shall observe the following normative principles: self-determination of peoples; nonintervention; the peaceful settlement of disputes; the prohibition of the threat or use of force in international relations; the legal equality of States; international cooperation for development; respect, protection and promotion of human rights and the struggle for international peace and security;
  • Convene Congress into special session, when agreed by the Standing Committee;
  • Provide the judiciary the aid they need for the expeditious exercise of its functions;
  • Enable all classes of ports, establish maritime and border customs and designate their location;
  • Grant, according to law, pardons to criminals convicted of crimes jurisdiction of the federal courts;
  • Grant exclusive privileges for a limited time, in accordance with the respective law, to discoverers, inventors or perfectors in any branch of industry;
  • When the Senate is not in session, the president of the Republic may make appointments mentioned in sections III, IV and IX, with the approval of the Standing Committee;
  • At any time, opt for a coalition government with one or more of the political parties represented in Congress.
  • To submit to the Senate, the three candidates for the appointment of judges of the Supreme Court and submit their resignations to the approval of licenses and Senate itself;
  • Objecting the appointment of commissioners body that sets the guarantor Article 6. of this Constitution made by the Senate, under the terms established in this Constitution and the law;
  • The others expressly conferred by this Constitution.
A decree is a legislative instrument that has an expiration date and that is issued by one of the three branches of government. Congress may issue decrees, and the President may issue decrees as well. They have all the power of laws but cannot be changed by a power that did not issue them. They are very limited in their extent. One such decree is the federal budget, which is issued by Congress. The president's office may suggest a budget, but at the end of the day, it is Congress that decrees how to collect taxes and how to spend them. A Supreme Court ruling on Vicente Fox's veto of the 2004 budget suggests that the president may have the right to veto decrees from Congress.
Since 1997, the Congress has been plural, usually with opposition parties having a majority. Major reforms have to pass by Congress, and the ruling president usually found their efforts blocked: the PRI's Zedillo by opposing PAN/PRD congressmen, and later the PAN's Fox by the PRI and PRD. The PAN would push the reforms it denied to the PRI and vice versa. This situation, novel in a country where Congress was +90% dominated by the president's party for most of the century, has led to a legal analysis of the president's power. Formerly almost a dictator, the current times show the president's power as somewhat limited. In 2004, President Fox threatened to veto the budget approved by Congress, claiming the budget overstepped his authority to lead the country, only to learn no branch of government had the power to veto a decree issued by another branch of government.