MX-D-01: The 2024 Sheinbaum Landslide and the Morena Supermajority

Status: DRAFTWords: 6,065

1. Key Takeaways

The 2 June 2024 Mexican federal elections produced the largest popular-vote share for any Mexican presidential candidate in modern electoral history. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional / Morena, in coalition with the Partido del Trabajo and the Partido Verde Ecologista de México as Sigamos Haciendo Historia) received 35,924,519 votes (59.76%); Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz (the Fuerza y Corazón por México coalition of the Partido Acción Nacional, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática) received 16,502,925 votes (27.45%); Jorge Álvarez Máynez (Movimiento Ciudadano) received 6,205,755 votes (10.32%). Voter turnout was 61.04% of the 99.7 million-strong Lista Nominal de Electores — moderate by Mexican federal-election standards. Sheinbaum became the first woman President of the Republic in Mexican history.
The Sheinbaum margin of 32.31 percentage points over Gálvez was the largest popular-vote margin in any Mexican presidential election since the 1934 Lázaro Cárdenas election (which was conducted under the PNR pre-PRI structure). The margin substantially exceeded AMLO's 2018 margin (30.06 points) and Vicente Fox's 2000 margin (6.42 points). The vote-share-and-margin-of-victory statistics are the principal numerical evidence that the 2024 result is best understood not as a stand-alone election outcome but as the consolidation phase of the political-coalition realignment that began with AMLO's 2018 landslide.
The federal congressional election produced a Morena-PT-PVEM coalition supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies and a near-supermajority in the Senate. The Chamber of Deputies result: Morena 256 seats; PT 51; PVEM 77 (combined coalition 384 of 500); PAN 71; PRI 35; PRD 1; MC 26; remaining minor allocations. The Senate result: Morena 60 seats; PT 6; PVEM 17 (combined coalition 83 of 128, two seats short of the 86-seat two-thirds-supermajority); PAN 22; PRI 14; PRD 0; MC 5. The Chamber's two-thirds threshold (334 seats) was crossed; the Senate's two-thirds threshold (86 seats) was crossed in the post-election period through the strategic-defection-and-confirmation arrangements that the September 2024 judicial reform vote required (one PAN senator, Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez, voted with the coalition in the September 2024 vote).
Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated on 1 October 2024 at the Cámara de Diputados in Mexico City. The inaugural address committed her sexenio to the continuation of the Cuarta Transformación (Fourth Transformation, the AMLO-era governing framework) under what she has called the "second floor" (segundo piso) of the 4T. The address committed to: continuation of the welfare-programme architecture (Becas Benito Juárez, Adultos Mayores, Sembrando Vida); deepening of the energy-sovereignty programme through Pemex and CFE; full implementation of the September 2024 judicial reform; expansion of the Bienestar pension; and a Mexico-first industrial-policy framework that would subsequently be formalised as Plan México (announced 13 January 2025).
The 15 September 2024 publication in the Diario Oficial de la Federación of the Decree of the Judicial Reform Constitutional Amendment was the most-consequential legislative-and-constitutional action of the post-2018 Mexican political period. The amendment provided for: (i) popular election of all federal judges (Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, federal Circuit Court magistrates, federal District Court judges) and of state-level judiciary in subsequent reforms; (ii) reduction of the SCJN from 11 to 9 ministers, with all serving 12-year terms (replacing the prior 15-year terms); (iii) creation of the Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial as a constitutional disciplinary body for the judiciary; (iv) elimination of the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal and reassignment of its functions; (v) elimination of the SCJN's Pleno and replacement with a two-chamber structure. The first round of judicial elections was conducted on 1 June 2025; the post-1-June-2025 SCJN took office on 1 September 2025.
The constitutional amendment was approved through a sequence of tightly-conducted votes in September 2024. The Chamber of Deputies approved the amendment on 4 September 2024 by 359 to 135 (the two-thirds supermajority threshold of 334 was met). The Senate approved on 11 September 2024 by 86 to 41 — exactly the two-thirds threshold, achieved through the defection of Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez (PAN, Veracruz) from his coalition's instructions. The state-legislature ratification (a constitutional amendment requires approval by an absolute majority of state legislatures, 17 of 32) was completed on 13–15 September 2024 with substantially-greater-than-required state ratification. The Decree was published on 15 September 2024 — Mexico's Independence Day eve, a deliberately-symbolic timing.
The Plan México industrial-policy framework, announced on 13 January 2025, was the operational economic-policy programme of the early Sheinbaum sexenio. The Plan committed to: (i) increasing private and public investment to 28 per cent of GDP by 2030 (from approximately 22 per cent in 2024); (ii) creating 1.5 million jobs in advanced manufacturing through 2030; (iii) reducing the import-content of consumed goods through nearshoring-and-import-substitution priorities; (iv) supporting Mexican-content requirements consistent with the USMCA framework; (v) infrastructure investment commitments through 2030. The Plan operates as the economic-policy framework against which the post-January 2025 Trump-2 tariff regime has been the principal external test.
The Trump-2 tariff regime, commencing with the 1 February 2025 Executive Order 14195 imposing duties on Mexican goods under the IEEPA framework citing fentanyl and migration concerns, has been the principal external constraint on the early Sheinbaum sexenio. The IEEPA tariffs (25 per cent on most non-USMCA-compliant Mexican goods; subsequent expansions and selective application; multiple postponements and reinstatements through February–May 2025) have produced an environment of acute bilateral tension. Sheinbaum's response — measured, formal, and emphasising negotiation rather than retaliation, with explicit invocation of the Estrada Doctrine of non-intervention and reciprocal-respect — has been the consistent positioning. The post-March 2025 partial-resolution arrangements have not delivered a stable bilateral framework as of mid-2025.
The cartel-and-security trajectory through the early Sheinbaum sexenio has been characterised by the appointment of Omar García Harfuch (former Mexico City Public-Security Secretary, with substantial direct cartel-confrontation operational record) as Secretary of Public Security and Citizen Protection. The post-October 2024 trajectory has produced: substantial fentanyl-precursor-and-laboratory seizures (the post-2024 record exceeds the cumulative 2018–2023 record on most precursor categories); high-profile cartel-figure arrests including (in February 2025) the joint US-Mexico operation that produced the transfer of 29 cartel-aligned figures to US custody; and the Sinaloa-internal-conflict (the post-2024 Chapitos-vs-Mayos division within the Sinaloa Cartel) that has produced substantial intra-cartel violence in Sinaloa and parts of the broader Pacific corridor. A verdict on the security-policy outcome remains pending.
Three contested-record questions structure the assessment of the 2024 result. First, whether the 59.76 per cent Sheinbaum vote share represents a substantive popular endorsement of the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 or whether it reflects the structural-electoral consequence of the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition's collapse (the 2024 Gálvez vote share of 27.45 per cent was lower than the 2018 PAN-PRD combined or the 2012 PAN+PRD combined). Second, whether the September 2024 judicial reform represents constitutional-democratic refinement (the popular-election framework as a democratic-deepening of the judicial-selection process) or constitutional-democratic contraction (the politicisation of the federal judiciary and the elimination of the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal as institutional checks). Third, whether the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 represents an institutionalisation of the post-2018 realignment that will transcend AMLO's personal authority or whether the post-2024 trajectory is dependent on Sheinbaum's personal-political authority in the same manner that the 2018–2024 trajectory was dependent on AMLO's. The three questions remain unresolved as of mid-2025.

2. The Pre-Election Configuration (2018–2024)

2.1 The 2018 AMLO Realignment

The 2 July 2018 federal election produced AMLO's 53.19 per cent landslide and the founding congressional majority of Morena (a party AMLO had founded in 2014 after departing the PRD). The 2018 result reorganised Mexican politics: the PRI's vote share collapsed from 31.59 per cent (2012) to 16.40 per cent (2018, with Meade); the PAN-PRD coalition's combined vote share (Anaya) was 22.27 per cent. Morena and its allies won the Chamber of Deputies majority and the Senate majority; the AMLO programme — the Cuarta Transformación — was operationalised through six years of welfare-expansion (Becas Benito Juárez, Adultos Mayores, Sembrando Vida), energy-sovereignty (the post-2018 Pemex and CFE prioritisation), institutional-reform (the autonomous-bodies reorientation, the Guardia Nacional establishment), and the daily-press-conference framework (mañaneras).

The 2018–2024 sexenio produced a series of divisive structural questions: the Pacific Alliance and USMCA constraints on the energy-sovereignty programme; the post-2019 abrazos no balazos (hugs, not bullets) security-policy positioning that civil-society-and-academic commentary characterised as inadequate to the cartel-violence trajectory; the post-2020 COVID-19 management that the AMLO government characterised as broadly successful and that critical commentary characterised as the worst per-capita-mortality outcome in Latin America; and the post-2022 institutional-reform sequence (the National Electoral Institute reforms attempted, the ten-day judicial-reform process attempted before AMLO's term ended). The 2018–2024 period established the Morena-led political coalition's operational capacity and its policy programme.

2.2 The Sheinbaum Pre-Candidacy

The Morena pre-candidacy process operated under a 2023–2024 framework that the party characterised as a competitive internal selection. The principal pre-candidates: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (former Jefa de Gobierno of Mexico City 2018–2023, former Secretary of Environment for Mexico City under AMLO 2000–2006); Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón (former Secretary of Foreign Relations 2018–2023, former Jefe de Gobierno of Mexico City 2006–2012); and Adán Augusto López Hernández (former Secretary of Government 2021–2023). Polling aggregations conducted during the September–October 2023 pre-candidacy period showed Sheinbaum with substantial leads in most internal-Morena pollings; the September 2023 announcement that Sheinbaum was selected as the Coordinadora Nacional of the Defensa de la Cuarta Transformación (the Morena pre-candidacy designation) produced an Ebrard internal-protest and a brief Ebrard departure-and-return cycle that ultimately resulted in Ebrard's continued Morena affiliation through the campaign.

The Sheinbaum candidacy announcement was conducted under conditions that institutionalised the AMLO-Sheinbaum relationship as a continuity-and-succession framework. Sheinbaum's biography — physicist by training (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México doctorate in Energy Engineering 1995, post-doctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California), member of the IPCC working group that received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, environmental-policy career — was substantially distinct from AMLO's older-generation populist-political tradition. The Sheinbaum candidacy was characterised by the campaign as continuity-with-evolution: the Cuarta Transformación programmatic continuity combined with a generational-and-technocratic shift in the leadership profile.

2.3 The Gálvez Coalition Candidacy

The PAN-PRI-PRD coalition (Fuerza y Corazón por México) candidate was Xóchitl Gálvez Ruiz, an Indigenous-Hñähñu-descended businesswoman, former Director-General of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (under Vicente Fox 2000–2006), Senator for Mexico City 2018–2024, and PAN-affiliated politician. The Gálvez candidacy was announced through a 2023 process of inter-party negotiations among the PAN, the PRI, and the PRD; the formal candidacy registration was completed in November 2023.

The Gálvez campaign emphasised: (i) institutional integrity and the rule of law (with substantial focus on the post-AMLO autonomous-bodies-reorientation as a target for restoration); (ii) cartel-violence-and-security policy with a more aggressive enforcement posture; (iii) economic policy emphasising private-investment-mobilisation and the Pacific Alliance / USMCA framework; (iv) social-policy continuity on the welfare-programme architecture but with greater institutional accountability. The campaign's structural challenge was the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition's underlying programmatic-and-electoral-coalition incoherence: the three parties had been longstanding-electoral-rivals through the post-2000 period, and the coalition's joint-electoral structure required compromise on multiple key positions.

2.4 The Álvarez Máynez Candidacy

Movimiento Ciudadano's candidate, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, was a younger-generation political figure who had been a federal deputy (2012–2015, 2018–2021), state deputy in Zacatecas, and federal senator (2021–2024). The MC candidacy emphasised: (i) generational change and political-renewal positioning; (ii) institutional-reform but not under the PAN-PRI-PRD framework; (iii) youth-and-urban-middle-class engagement; (iv) selective coalition with progressive-but-non-Morena positioning. The MC trajectory through the campaign — building from approximately 5 per cent in early 2024 polling to the eventual 10.32 per cent result — was the principal third-party performance of the 2024 cycle.

3. The Campaign and the 2 June Election

3.1 The Official Campaign Period

The official campaign period for the 2024 federal elections ran from 1 March 2024 to 29 May 2024 (with a five-day period of pre-electoral silence before the 2 June voting). The campaign included three televised debates (organised by the INE under the Trilateral format involving the three principal candidates): the first on 7 April 2024 in Mexico City; the second on 28 April 2024 in Mexico City; the third on 19 May 2024 in Monterrey. The debates were extensively covered and were the subject of substantial post-debate-polling and commentary.

3.2 Campaign Issues

The 2024 campaign's principal issues:

Continuity of the Cuarta Transformación: Sheinbaum's continuity-with-evolution positioning vs. the Gálvez restoration positioning. The 4T welfare-programme architecture and the institutional-reform programme were the principal terrain.
Security and cartels: the trajectory of the abrazos no balazos approach vs. a more aggressive enforcement posture. The fentanyl crisis and the cross-border dimension were central.
The economy and USMCA: the Pacific Alliance / USMCA framework, the energy-sovereignty programme's tension with US-Canada constraints, and the inflation-and-cost-of-living trajectory.
Constitutional and judicial reform: AMLO's pre-election proposal for the judicial-reform constitutional amendment was the most-divisive single issue; the Sheinbaum positioning was supportive of the reform; the Gálvez positioning was opposed.
Migration and the Mexico-US bilateral: the post-2023 Title 42 expiry, the pre-2024 US election context, and the bilateral-cooperation trajectory.

3.3 The 2 June Election

The election was conducted on 2 June 2024 across approximately 170,000 casillas electorales under INE supervision. Voting was generally orderly; INE preliminary results (PREP) were available from the night of 2 June; the official cómputo distrital certification was completed on 8 June 2024. The TEPJF resolutions on the contested elements were completed by August 2024.

The certified national result has been described in Section 1. The geographic distribution of the result was substantially national: Sheinbaum carried 31 of 32 states (all states except Aguascalientes, where Gálvez prevailed). The state-by-state vote shares produced a Sheinbaum result above 50 per cent in 28 of 32 states; Sheinbaum's strongest states included Tabasco (AMLO's home state, 73.0 per cent), Chiapas (72.5 per cent), Mexico City (61.0 per cent), and Veracruz (62.5 per cent). The Aguascalientes result (Gálvez 47.4 per cent, Sheinbaum 42.5 per cent) was the only state in which the Morena coalition did not prevail; the next-closest Morena-margin states were Querétaro and Yucatán (both Morena-margins under 5 percentage points).

3.4 The Federal-Congressional Result

The federal-congressional result produced the supermajority structures described in Section 1. The Chamber of Deputies allocation under the proportional-representation component (200 of 500 seats) was the subject of substantial INE-and-TEPJF litigation through July–August 2024 over the sobrerrepresentación (over-representation) limit (the constitutional 8-percentage-point cap on the difference between a coalition's vote share and its seat share). The TEPJF's August 2024 resolutions allocated the proportional-representation seats in a manner that the opposition coalition characterised as exceeding the sobrerrepresentación limit; the Morena-PT-PVEM coalition's combined seat share (76.8 per cent) substantially exceeded its combined vote share (54.0 per cent) in the proportional-representation component.

The Chamber's sobrerrepresentación question became the principal post-election institutional contestation. The opposition coalition's argument was that the constitutional limit had been breached by approximately 14 percentage points; the TEPJF resolution was that the proportional-representation seats were correctly allocated under the existing constitutional and electoral-legal framework. The contested-record on the sobrerrepresentación allocation has continued through 2025.

4. The 1 October Inauguration and the Sheinbaum Cabinet

4.1 The Inaugural Address

President Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated on 1 October 2024 at the Cámara de Diputados in Mexico City, taking the constitutional oath of office before the joint-chambers session and receiving the presidential sash from outgoing President AMLO in a deliberately-staged-and-symbolic ceremony. The inaugural address — running approximately 90 minutes — was structured around the segundo piso de la Cuarta Transformación (second floor of the Fourth Transformation) framework that had been the campaign's principal organising rhetoric.

The address committed the sexenio to:

continuation of the welfare-programme architecture (Becas Benito Juárez, Adultos Mayores, Sembrando Vida, Programa de Apoyo a Adultos Mayores) with selected expansions (the new Bienestar pension's expansion to women aged 60–65 was announced as a flagship commitment);
full implementation of the September 2024 judicial reform, with the first round of judicial elections scheduled for 1 June 2025;
deepening of the energy-sovereignty programme through the post-2024 Pemex-and-CFE strategic-investment plan, balanced with private-investment under USMCA-compliant frameworks;
a Mexico-first industrial-policy framework (subsequently formalised as Plan México);
public-security policy under the framework that combined intelligence-and-prosecutorial-capacity-strengthening with continued focus on social-and-developmental causes of cartel-environment;
the continuation of the mañaneras daily-press-conference format;
the climate-and-environmental commitments including the Mexican implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement updated NDC.

4.2 The Cabinet

The Sheinbaum cabinet, announced through the September 2024 transition period and formally inaugurated alongside the President on 1 October 2024, included:

Secretary of Government (Gobernación): Rosa Icela Rodríguez Velázquez (former Secretary of Citizen Security under AMLO); subsequently moved in mid-2025
Secretary of Foreign Relations: Juan Ramón de la Fuente Ramírez (former Rector of UNAM 1999–2007, former Mexican Permanent Representative to the United Nations)
Secretary of Finance and Public Credit: Rogelio Ramírez de la O (continuing from AMLO; subsequently moved 2025)
Secretary of Public Security and Citizen Protection: Omar García Harfuch (former Mexico City Secretary of Citizen Security under Sheinbaum 2018–2023)
Secretary of Defense (SEDENA): Ricardo Trevilla Trejo (Army general; succeeded Luis Cresencio Sandoval)
Secretary of the Navy: Raymundo Pedro Morales Ángeles (Admiral)
Secretary of Energy: Luz Elena González Escobar
Secretary of Economy: Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón (the 2018–2023 Foreign Affairs Secretary, returning to the cabinet in a different portfolio)
Secretary of Environment: Alicia Bárcena Ibarra (former Executive Secretary of CEPAL / ECLAC 2008–2022)
Secretary of Health: David Kershenobich Stalnikowitz (gastroenterologist, former Director of the Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición)
Secretary of Education: Mario Delgado Carrillo (former Morena President; replacing Leticia Ramírez who served the AMLO term)

The cabinet's gender composition — over 50 per cent women — was the highest female-representation cabinet in Mexican history. The cabinet's professional-and-academic profile (substantial UNAM, IPN, and post-doctoral-international-research credentials across multiple secretaries) reflected the technocratic-positioning of the Sheinbaum sexenio.

4.3 The First-Hundred-Days Trajectory

The first hundred days (1 October 2024 – 8 January 2025) included:

Implementation of the September 2024 judicial-reform secondary legislation, including the appointment of the Comité de Evaluación responsible for the candidacy-vetting for the June 2025 judicial elections.
The 13 January 2025 announcement of Plan México (one day before the 100-day mark).
The early December 2024 transition of the federal government's accounting framework (the post-2024 fiscal architecture).
The early-December 2024 decisions on the Bienestar pension expansion to women aged 60–65 (the Pensión Mujeres Bienestar).
The first-quarter posture-establishment toward the incoming Trump-2 administration (formally inaugurated on 20 January 2025).

The post-100-days Cien Días address on 8 January 2025 was the first formal accountability event of the new sexenio; the address committed to the trajectory established in the 1 October inauguration.

5. The September 2024 Judicial Reform

5.1 The Constitutional Amendment

The judicial-reform constitutional amendment was the principal legislative-and-constitutional action of the post-2024 period. The amendment was structured around six principal modifications to the Mexican constitutional framework:

Popular election of federal judges: SCJN Ministers, federal Circuit Court magistrates, and federal District Court judges to be elected by direct popular vote. The first elections scheduled for 1 June 2025 (with the post-1-June-2025 incumbents taking office on 1 September 2025).
SCJN restructure: reduction from 11 Ministers to 9, with all serving 12-year terms (reduced from the prior 15-year terms). The pre-existing Ministers ineligible to continue without standing for popular election; the September 2024 transition produced the resignation of multiple Ministers including the Chief Minister Norma Piña.
Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial: a new constitutional disciplinary body for the judiciary, replacing certain functions of the prior Consejo de la Judicatura Federal; members elected by popular vote.
Elimination of the Consejo de la Judicatura Federal: the prior judicial-administration body abolished, with its functions reassigned to the new Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial and to other reorganised institutions.
SCJN structural reform: elimination of the Pleno and replacement with a two-chamber structure; modifications to the SCJN's procedural framework.
State-level judicial reform: a framework for similar reforms at the state-judiciary level, with the state legislatures empowered to implement parallel reforms.

5.2 The Legislative Sequence

The amendment was approved through the following sequence:

Date	Stage
5 February 2024	AMLO submits the original judicial-reform proposal to the Chamber of Deputies
September 2023 – August 2024	Pre-legislative consultation including the Diálogo Nacional sobre la Reforma del Poder Judicial
1 September 2024	New (post-2024 election) Chamber of Deputies and Senate sworn in; the supermajority enables the amendment
4 September 2024	Chamber of Deputies approves: 359 to 135 (two-thirds threshold met)
11 September 2024	Senate approves: 86 to 41 (two-thirds threshold met, with one PAN defection)
13–15 September 2024	State-legislature ratification: 23 of 32 states ratify before the federal publication
15 September 2024	Decree published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación; constitutional amendment in force

The Senate vote of 11 September 2024 was the most-contested element of the legislative sequence. The Morena-PT-PVEM coalition had 83 of 128 Senate seats; the two-thirds threshold required 86. The defection of Miguel Ángel Yunes Márquez (PAN, Veracruz, son of former Veracruz Governor Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares) provided the 86th vote. The Yunes Márquez defection was the subject of substantial post-vote PAN-internal-political contestation; Yunes Márquez was subsequently expelled from the PAN.

5.3 The First Round of Judicial Elections (1 June 2025)

The first round of judicial elections under the new constitutional framework was conducted on 1 June 2025. The election was the most extensive single-day judicial-electoral event in any country's modern history: approximately 880 federal-judiciary positions were on the ballot (881 according to the official INE announcement), including 9 SCJN Ministerial seats, 5 Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial seats, multiple federal Circuit Court magistrate seats, and federal District Court judge seats. Voter turnout was 12.9 per cent of the Lista Nominal de Electores — substantially below the federal-election turnout figures, attributed to: the unprecedented nature of the judicial-electoral framework; the limited campaign-and-information infrastructure available for judicial candidates; the post-amendment opposition-coalition recommendation to abstain or to invalidate the ballot.

The post-1-June-2025 SCJN composition produced a substantially-Morena-aligned bench: the elected Ministers included Hugo Aguilar Ortiz (the new Chief Minister), Lenia Batres Guadarrama (continuing in modified position), and others. The pre-existing SCJN-Minister composition was substantially altered; the post-1-September-2025 SCJN inauguration completed the transition.

5.4 The Constitutional-and-Democratic Contestation

The September 2024 judicial reform has been the most-contested constitutional-and-democratic question of the early Sheinbaum sexenio. The principal positions:

The constitutional-democratic-deepening position (Government of Mexico, Morena, aligned commentary): the popular-election framework deepens the democratic-legitimacy of the federal judiciary, addresses the corruption-and-elite-capture concerns about the prior Consejo-based selection process, and aligns the Mexican judicial-architecture with the popular-sovereignty principle established in the 1917 Constitution.
The constitutional-democratic-contraction position (PAN, PRI, the academic-constitutional-law commentary, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Bar Association, multiple international academic and civil-society organisations): the popular-election framework politicises the federal judiciary, undermines the judicial-independence principle, eliminates institutional-checks on the executive-and-legislative branches, and represents constitutional-democratic contraction.
The mixed-assessment position (some Mexican-and-international academic commentary, including some commentators who supported elements of the prior judicial-reform framework while opposing specific provisions): the reform contains genuine institutional-improvement elements (the disciplinary-body restructuring, the term-length modifications) alongside problematic provisions (the popular-election-without-adequate-vetting, the 12-month-transition, the elimination of the Consejo); the eventual constitutional-democratic outcome will depend on the implementation trajectory rather than on the constitutional-framework alone.

6. The Trump-2 Tariff Regime and the Bilateral Trajectory

6.1 The 1 February 2025 Executive Order

On 20 January 2025, Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States. The Trump-2 administration's posture toward Mexico was articulated through the campaign and the transition as combining a re-aggressive immigration-enforcement framework, a fentanyl-and-cartel-prioritisation framework, and a tariff-based renegotiation framework for the USMCA. The 1 February 2025 Executive Order 14195 — the foundational bilateral-policy action of the post-January 2025 period — imposed a 25 per cent tariff on Mexican goods (with selected exclusions) under the IEEPA framework, citing the fentanyl-flow-and-cartel-violence concerns as the national-emergency justification.

The Sheinbaum government's response was conducted within hours of the Executive Order's publication. The Sheinbaum-Trump telephone-call of 3 February 2025 produced the first 30-day suspension of the tariff regime, in exchange for Mexican commitments on: deployment of 10,000 Guardia Nacional troops to the northern border; intensified anti-fentanyl-precursor operations; bilateral-intelligence-cooperation under specific frameworks. The 4 March 2025 reinstatement of the tariffs was followed by a further 30-day suspension on 6 March 2025; the post-April 2025 trajectory has produced a series of partial-tariff-implementations and selective-suspensions without a stable bilateral framework.

6.2 The Sheinbaum Negotiating Posture

The Sheinbaum government's negotiating posture has been characterised by three principles:

Calm formal diplomacy: avoidance of personal-political-rhetoric escalation; engagement at the formal-diplomatic-channel level; consistent invocation of treaty-and-international-law frameworks.
Selective reciprocal measures: the post-March 2025 announcement of reciprocal tariff measures on selected US imports (with specific calibration to maximise pressure on Trump-2-aligned political-electoral constituencies); the post-April 2025 selective-procurement-policy modifications.
Multilateral and Pacific Alliance positioning: invocation of the USMCA dispute-settlement framework; coordination with Canada (under the post-2025 Mark Carney government) and with Latin American partners (under the Pacific Alliance and bilateral Latin American frameworks); selective engagement with the multilateral trade architecture.

The post-March 2025 trajectory has not produced a stable bilateral framework. The Sheinbaum government's domestic-political positioning has been broadly endorsed by Mexican public opinion (polling through April–June 2025 shows over 80 per cent approval of the Sheinbaum government's bilateral posture); the international-academic and economic-policy commentary has been broadly approving of the calm-and-formal posture. The ultimate political-economy outcome — whether the post-2025 USMCA framework is preserved, modified, or substantially-disrupted — remains unresolved as of mid-2025.

6.3 The Plan México Framework

The 13 January 2025 Plan México was the operational-economic-policy framework of the early Sheinbaum sexenio and the response to the post-Trump-2-election environment. The Plan committed to:

private and public investment of 28 per cent of GDP by 2030 (from approximately 22 per cent in 2024);
1.5 million jobs in advanced manufacturing through 2030;
nearshoring-and-import-substitution priorities;
Mexican-content requirements consistent with the USMCA framework;
specific infrastructure commitments (transmission-line expansion under CFE; freight-rail corridor expansions; port-infrastructure investment in Salina Cruz, Coatzacoalcos, and the Pacific corridor).

The Plan's relationship to the USMCA framework was structured to provide for compliance-with-the-existing-framework while creating selective-mexican-content-priorities that the post-2026 USMCA review process could address. The Plan operates as the principal economic-policy framework against which the Trump-2 tariff-regime confrontation has been the external test.

7. The Contested Record

7.1 The Mandate Question

The 2024 Sheinbaum mandate has been contested principally on two grounds. Three positions:

The substantive-popular-mandate position (Government of Mexico, Morena, aligned commentary): the 59.76 per cent vote share and the 32-point margin reflect genuine popular endorsement of the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 programme. The cumulative electoral-trajectory across 2018 (53.19 per cent), 2021 mid-term, and 2024 (59.76 per cent) demonstrates a sustained-and-deepening popular mandate.
The structural-electoral-consequence position (PAN-PRI-PRD coalition critical commentary, segments of the academic-political-science commentary): the 2024 result was substantially the structural-electoral consequence of the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition's collapse — the Gálvez vote share of 27.45 per cent was substantially below the cumulative PAN-PRI-PRD vote share of 2018 (PAN+PRD 22.27 per cent + PRI 16.40 per cent ≈ 38.67 per cent). The 2024 Sheinbaum mandate is genuine but is amplified by the structural-electoral-coalition-failure of the opposition.
The continuity-with-evolution position: the 2024 mandate is most-accurately understood as the consolidation phase of the 2018 realignment rather than as a stand-alone mandate. The Sheinbaum vote share is the cumulative consequence of the 2018 realignment's institutional-and-electoral entrenchment; the post-2024 trajectory will test whether the realignment has produced a durable Mexican political-coalition or whether the Morena coalition is dependent on the AMLO-Sheinbaum personal-political authority.

7.2 The Judicial Reform Question

The judicial reform has been the most-contested constitutional-and-democratic question of the early sexenio. The three positions described in Section 5.4 remain in active contestation; the post-1-June-2025 implementation trajectory will produce the empirical evidence on which the question will be evaluated. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights filed observations in October 2024; the Inter-American Court has not adjudicated; the Mexican SCJN's pre-amendment jurisprudence on the constitutional-architecture provided some guidance but the post-amendment SCJN's positioning is the pending question.

7.3 The Sobrerrepresentación Question

The 2024 Chamber of Deputies allocation produced a Morena-PT-PVEM coalition seat share (76.8 per cent) that substantially exceeded its combined vote share (54.0 per cent) in the proportional-representation component. The opposition coalition's argument was that the constitutional 8-percentage-point sobrerrepresentación limit was breached by approximately 14 percentage points; the TEPJF's August 2024 resolution allocated the seats consistent with the existing constitutional-and-electoral-legal framework. The contested-record on this question has continued through 2025; the 2027 mid-term-election context will be the next test of the framework.

7.4 The Cuarta Transformación Institutionalisation Question

Whether the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 represents an institutionalisation of the 2018 realignment that will transcend Sheinbaum's personal-political authority is the principal long-term contested question. Three positions:

Institutional-consolidation: the post-2024 institutional architecture (the supermajority in both chambers, the judicial reform, the executive-bureaucratic alignment) has consolidated the Morena coalition's institutional-political position; the post-2030 succession (the next Mexican presidential election) will be conducted within the post-2024 realignment framework; the realignment is durable.
Personal-political-dependency: the Sheinbaum-AMLO relationship is the institutional-political vehicle that sustains the post-2024 realignment; the post-2030 succession will be the test of whether the realignment can sustain a leadership-transition; the post-2030 trajectory is uncertain.
Political-economic-conditional: the realignment's durability depends on the post-2030 economic-policy outcomes, the post-2030 cartel-violence trajectory, and the post-2030 USMCA-framework-stability; the institutional architecture is necessary but not sufficient for the realignment's durability.

The three positions are not mutually exclusive; the post-2030 trajectory will produce the evidence on which the question will be evaluated.

8. Conclusion — The 2024 Result as Consolidation of the 2018 Realignment

The 2 June 2024 Mexican federal elections produced the most-decisive single-coalition popular-vote-share in modern Mexican electoral history and the most-extensive congressional supermajority of the post-PRI period. The result was, principally, the consolidation phase of the political-coalition realignment that began with AMLO's 2018 landslide; the Sheinbaum margin and the supermajority structures were the institutional-electoral consequence of the 2018 realignment's six-year operational-and-electoral entrenchment combined with the structural-electoral consequence of the PAN-PRI-PRD coalition's substantial collapse.

The September 2024 judicial reform — enacted through the post-2024 supermajority structures — was the most-consequential legislative-and-constitutional action of the post-2018 Mexican period. The reform's constitutional-democratic implications, the post-1-June-2025 implementation trajectory, and the post-1-September-2025 SCJN-and-broader-judicial-architecture composition will be the principal political-economy test of the early Sheinbaum sexenio.

Three structural questions will determine the verdict on the 2024 result and on the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 trajectory.

First, whether the Plan México industrial-policy framework, the post-2024 fiscal architecture, and the Trump-2-tariff-regime confrontation produce a sustainable post-2025 economic-political-economy trajectory. The post-March 2025 bilateral trajectory has not produced a stable framework; the post-2026 USMCA review process will be the principal external test.

Second, whether the September 2024 judicial reform produces durable institutional-democratic outcomes or whether the post-1-June-2025 implementation trajectory reveals constitutional-democratic-contraction concerns. The post-1-September-2025 SCJN's positioning, the post-2025 institutional-political environment, and the Inter-American-Court-and-international-academic assessments will produce the evidence.

Third, whether the Cuarta Transformación 2.0 institutionalisation transcends the Sheinbaum-AMLO personal-political authority and produces a durable post-2030 coalition. The 2027 mid-term-election context, the post-2027 institutional-political environment, and the eventual 2030 presidential succession process will produce the evidence.

This document, written in the early Sheinbaum sexenio and prior to the 2027 mid-term-election context, records the 2024 result, the September 2024 judicial reform, the early-2025 Plan México framework, the Trump-2-tariff-regime confrontation, and the contested-record as they have crystallised through mid-2025, on the methodological premise that the corpus's value lies in preserving the contested-record at the moment of crystallisation rather than in premature settlement of the longer-term verdict.

End of document. Status: DRAFT. Contested-record framing applied. Sources: 22 primary references. Cross-references: 11 forward-and-back. Symmetry pass pending until MX-A-01, MX-C-01, MX-C-08, MX-D-02, MX-D-03, MX-D-04, MX-J-04 are written.

Sources

Instituto Nacional Electoral (INE), Cómputos Distritales — Elección Presidencial 2024, certified result 8 June 2024.
INE, Resultados de la Elección de Diputaciones Federales 2024; Resultados de la Elección del Senado 2024.
Sala Superior del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF), Resoluciones sobre la Elección Presidencial 2024, August 2024.
President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, Discurso de Toma de Posesión (Inaugural Address), 1 October 2024 (Cámara de Diputados, Mexico City).
Sheinbaum, Mensaje a la Nación — Primer Informe Trimestral, January 2025.
Cabinet, Plan México — Industrial Policy Framework, 13 January 2025.
Decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, en materia de Reforma del Poder Judicial, Diario Oficial de la Federación, 15 September 2024.
INE, Estadísticas del Padrón Electoral y la Lista Nominal de Electores 2024.
United States Government, Executive Order 14195 (Imposing Duties to Address the Situation at Our Southern Border), 1 February 2025; subsequent IEEPA-tariff executive orders March–April 2025.
Government of Mexico, Comunicados de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores on US tariffs, February–April 2025.
Banco de México (Banxico), Comunicados de Política Monetaria (October 2024 – June 2025).
INEGI, Producto Interno Bruto, Inflación, Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo (2024–2025).
Sheinbaum, Cien Días (100 Days) Address, 8 January 2025.
Morena, Plataforma Electoral 2024; PAN-PRI-PRD coalition (Fuerza y Corazón por México), Plataforma Electoral 2024.
La Jornada, archive coverage of the campaign and post-election period.
Reforma, archive coverage.
El País México, archive coverage.
Animal Político, archive coverage and investigative reports.
Wilson Center Mexico Institute, Mexico Election Analysis 2024–2025; subsequent briefings.
Council on Foreign Relations, Latin America's Moment blog, Mexico entries 2024–2025.
Brookings Institution, Mexico Initiative, post-election analyses.
Roderic Ai Camp and Jorge G. Castañeda, post-2024 commentary in Foreign Affairs, El País, and Letras Libres.

MX-A-01: 2000 Vicente Fox Election — End of 71-Year PRI Rule (the founding rupture; the 2024 result is the third post-PRI realignment)
MX-B-01: Peña Nieto Presidency (2012–2018) — predecessor era; the Pacto por México and the Ayotzinapa context
MX-C-01: 2018 AMLO Landslide and Morena's Founding Win (the proximate antecedent; the 2024 result consolidates the 2018 realignment)
MX-C-02: Cuarta Transformación (4T) Programme — sister doc on the AMLO-era operational programme
MX-C-08: 2024 Judicial Reform Constitutional Amendment — sister doc, deeper detail
MX-D-02: Sheinbaum Presidency First Year — sister doc, sequel
MX-D-03: Trump-2 Tariff Confrontation (2025) — sequel doc on the post-January 2025 bilateral
MX-D-04: Implementation of the 2024 Judicial Reform (Judge Elections June 2025) — sequel
MX-F-01: Mexico–US Bilateral (2000–present) — context
MX-F-02: Pacific Alliance (2011–present) — context
MX-J-04: 2024 Judicial Reform Constitutional Contestation — contested-record companion
MX-H-PRES-05: Claudia Sheinbaum biographical anchor
MX-H-PRES-04: Andrés Manuel López Obrador biographical predecessor
MX-K-01: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
MX-A-02: Calderón Presidency (2006-2012) — back-reference added by symmetry sweep
MX-A-03: Peña Nieto Presidency (2012-2018) — back-reference added by symmetry sweep
MX-R-01: Mexico Governance Books Canon
MX-J-01: Ayotzinapa 43 Contested Record
MX-G-01: Pemex and Energy Architecture (2013-2024)
MX-B-02: Pacto por México (2012-2014)
MX-B-04: NAFTA Renegotiation and USMCA (2017-2024)
MX-B-03: Ayotzinapa Procedural Investigation (2014-2024)
MX-E-01: US–Mexico Migration Cooperation: From Remain in Mexico to CBP One to Plan Frontera Norte (2018–2025)
MX-A-04: The Fox Presidency, the First Post-PRI Sexenio, and the Institutional-Democratic-Transition Phase (2000–2006)
MX-D-05: Sheinbaum Year Two: USMCA 2026 Review and Economic Recalibration (2025-2026)
MX-E-02: US-Mexico Trump-2 tariff confrontation 2025-2026
MX-G-02: back-reference added by symmetry sweep
MX-H-PRES-02: Felipe Calderón Hinojosa — A Biography
MX-H-PRES-03: Enrique Peña Nieto — A Biography
MX-H-PRES-06: Carlos Salinas de Gortari — A Biography
MX-H-PRES-07: Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León — A Biography
MX-D-06: Sheinbaum Year Two — USMCA Review, Cartel-FTO Confrontation, Migration Management, and the 2027 Mid-Term Trajectory
MX-I-01: The INE and Mexican Electoral Institutional Architecture
MX-K-02: The 2013 Energy Reform and Its Reversal — Pemex, the Opening, and the Counter-Reform
MX-O-01: Mexico Megatrends — The 2030s Questions
MX-M-01: "The Perfect Dictatorship" — PRI Hegemony as Political Idea