MEXICO CITY -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday that his proposed judiciary reform could be approved in September, further spooking markets as the peso weakened 1.5%.
When asked about a transition meeting with President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday, Lopez Obrador said he continues to urge his judicial reform, which was first proposed in February and aims to replace an appointed Supreme Court with popularly elected judges.
The ruling coalition fared even better than expected in the June 2 election, giving them a super-majority in the lower house and close to one in the Senate and putting them in a strong position to pass constitutional reforms when the new legislature takes office.
While the newly elected Congress will take office at the beginning of September, Sheinbaum will not be inaugurated until a month later, giving Lopez Obrador and lawmakers a window to try to enact his reforms.
The prospect of the reform, which Sheinbaum has said would be “among the first” that could be passed, has prompted market jitters and Mexico’s peso to slide.
The peso weakened some 1.5% Tuesday following Lopez Obrador’s comments.
Last week it weakened 7.55% against the dollar, its largest weekly decline since the start of pandemic lockdowns in March 2020.
(Reporting by Ana Isabel Martínez, Raúl Cortés Fernández, Noé Torres, Stephanie Hamel; editing by Cassandra Garrison and Brendan O’Boyle)
