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MEXICO CITY—Mexicans will vote Sunday in nearly 2,700 judicial races for federal and state judges, a new practice that the government says will stamp out corruption but that opponents fear will give the ruling party control of the judiciary and empower candidates with criminal ties.
Nearly 7,800 candidates are participating in contests that will make Mexico the only country in the world to elect all its judges. In the U.S., many states elect judges, but federal judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
About half the country’s federal judges—including the nine justices on Mexico’s Supreme Court—will be replaced by newly elected magistrates at a time when President Claudia Sheinbaum and her ruling Morena party are riding high in the polls. Two-thirds of the candidates were chosen by the executive branch and by Congress, where Morena has a supermajority. The remaining half of federal judges will be replaced in a second election in 2027.
Sheinbaum has said the judicial election will help transform Mexico into a more equitable society. “The objective is to do away with corruption in the judicial branch," she said recently.
Many departing federal judges and civic groups say the judicial-system overhaul is a power grab that will eliminate checks and balances and risks returning Mexico to an authoritarian past that Sheinbaum has long criticized. Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party ran the country with little opposition for most of the 20th century. Sheinbaum’s Morena party holds the presidency, most state governorships and two-thirds of Congress.
An ad in Mexico City promoting the country’s judicial elections.
Polls show widespread dissatisfaction with the corruption-riddled judiciary. Justice is slow. Crimes go unreported and unpunished. But the legal system’s biggest failings lie with police and prosecutors rather than judges, Human Rights Watch says.
The overhaul is hurting Mexico’s efforts to attract billions of dollars in investment and could put Mexico at odds with its top trading partners as the U.S., Canada and Mexico prepare to review their free-trade treaty, business leaders said. The peso has depreciated more than 2.5% against the dollar since early June, shortly before Sheinbaum’s party won the supermajority it needed in Congress to pass the judicial overhaul.
“It’s a bad idea," said Alberto Ramos, chief Latin American economist for Goldman Sachs.
The judicial elections violate free-trade treaty provisions that call for independent magistrates, the American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico said. Foreign investors are increasingly including international arbitration clauses in investment contracts to guard against the vagaries of Mexican law.
“This change in the justice system puts into question whether the court can provide fairness before the law," said Shannon O’Neil, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan U.S. think tank. “And if the state can’t lose, that breaches the treaty."
Weak requirements for candidates risk elevating underqualified magistrates. Drug cartels could try to influence elections for judges who work at high-security prisons where top criminals are locked up, said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico City-based security consultant.
In voting booths on Sunday, Mexicans will find a pages-long ballot bearing hundreds of names with different background colors identifying specific tribunals. Most candidates are unknown to voters, according to pollsters, who are projecting a low turnout.
“When you have no knowledge of the people you’re voting for, that means you don’t feel like voting," said César Gutiérrez Priego, who is running for one of nine seats on the Supreme Court.
He became a defense attorney after his father, the late drug czar Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was accused in 1997 of receiving bribes from organized crime. Gutiérrez Priego spent the past two decades defending soldiers accused of crimes.
His main challenge: He lacks the backing of the Morena party. As most nominations are controlled by Morena and turnout will likely be low, most voters are expected to be Morena sympathizers and poorer Mexicans mobilized by the party’s political machinery.
“No one will be elected who doesn’t have the backing of Morena’s political machine," said Ana Laura Magaloni, a Mexican legal scholar.
In the race for the Supreme Court, the candidate with the most votes will be elected chief justice. Polls show a top contender is Lenia Batres, a justice on the court since 2023. Batres, who is named after Vladimir Lenin, calls herself “the people’s justice."
Juan Luis Rojas, a candidate for federal criminal magistrate, spoke to potential voters at a market in Mexico City in May.
Political parties aren’t allowed to formally endorse candidates, but many Mexicans are resorting to multicolored cheat sheets with numbered choices for candidates favored by the parties. The sheets have been printed by grassroot organizations and political committees linked to state governments and Morena. Sheinbaum has urged electoral authorities to ensure a fair and secret vote.
“There are many ballots, and many colors," said Víctor Espino, a farmer leader in the impoverished southwestern state of Guerrero. “There are names, but the problem is, who is going to know who they are?"
A few days before the election, criminal judge Roberto Posán sprinted along the aisles of food and vegetable stalls in a Mexico City market to make himself known to voters. Posán, 39, is running to keep his position and campaigned in a bulletproof car with three armed bodyguards.
“I can’t promise I will absolve or condemn you, but I guarantee that if you turn up in my court you will get a fair shake from me, as it should be," said Posán, whose muscles bulged out of a yellow T-shirt as he handed out leaflets with a link to a WhatsApp group for his supporters.
Win or lose, Posán fears for the future of rule of law in Mexico.
“Judicial autonomy is over," he said.
Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com
When President Trump paused his tariff fight against Beijing this month, prominent voices in China praised their leader Xi Jinping as having fended off American pressure with resilience and resolution.
Beijing had taken a tough stance toward Trump’s tariffs, retaliating with economic countermeasures and vowing to “never kneel down" before foreign bullies. This defiance burnished Xi’s self-styled image as a leader with absolute authority, one imbued with the fortitude and spirit of sacrifice needed to guide China’s resurgence as a great power.
These qualities, some historians say, have roots in Xi’s formative years as a son of the revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun, whose harsh parenting and unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party—throughout a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution—seem to have inspired Xi Jinping to show the toughness his father demanded.
Party lore celebrates the elder Xi as a stoic figure who fought bravely for the Communist revolution and stayed true to the cause despite being wrongfully purged under Mao.
“While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?" historian Joseph Torigian writes in the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, which offers fresh vignettes and insights into the father’s influence on the Chinese leader.
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Xi Jinping, wearing a cap, with his father Xi Zhongxun. Photo: Stanford University Press
Many within the party elite misread Xi Jinping when he took power in 2012, expressing expectations that he would emulate his father’s reputation as a reformer who helped open up China’s economy and managed religious and ethnic minorities with a softer touch. Instead Xi used iron-fisted tactics to centralize power, squelch dissent and tighten party control over the economy and society.
Xi’s hard-line approach belies a deeper degree of continuity with his father, whose “absolute devotion" to the Communist Party may have inspired his son’s own commitment to it and its long-term rule, Torigian argues in “The Party’s Interests Come First."
Xi Zhongxun joined the Communist Party as a teenager in 1928 and won Mao’s trust as a revolutionary fighter. After the Communist victory in 1949, he took on roles as a regional leader, propaganda minister and vice premier, but was purged in 1962 for alleged “anti-party" activities.
Stunned by his downfall, the elder Xi told a friend that he felt like “a person who fell off an eighteen-floor building," according to the biography.
He was sent away from Beijing to work in a factory and separated from his family. During Mao’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which began as Xi Jinping entered his teens, militant Red Guards abused Xi Zhongxun at public-shaming rallies and, according to party accounts which don’t offer details, “persecuted" one of his daughters to death.
But Xi Zhongxun “never abandoned his emotional attachment to Mao," writes Torigian, who describes how the patriarch—while still in political disgrace—made Xi Jinping memorize some of Mao’s speeches. During a brief reunion in 1976, the father watched his son recite the speeches by heart while they both sat in their underwear, according to the book.
“Although the party betrayed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Zhongxun never betrayed the party," Torigian writes.
The elder Xi was rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, serving as a provincial chief, a member of the party’s elite Politburo and a senior lawmaker before being sidelined after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A father of four daughters and three sons across two marriages, the patriarch died in 2002 at the age of 88. Xi Jinping is the elder of the two sons he had with his second wife, Qi Xin.
Historians and people who knew Xi Zhongxun say he molded his son’s character by imposing brutal discipline at home—including strict rules on frugality enforced with physical beatings—and by recounting tales of his revolutionary exploits. During the Mao era, Xi Jinping often faced persecution as a child of a disgraced official—experiences he later credited for hardening his character and schooling him on the vagaries of power.
Xi Jinping “does seem to have learned quite a bit from his father about the nature and dynamics of Chinese politics, which even insiders struggle to navigate successfully—including Xi’s own father," said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a former director for China on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.
Xi Jinping showed reverence for his father, publicly and privately. Torigian recounts how the son would kowtow to his father at Lunar New Year gatherings, wait for the patriarch’s go-ahead before taking his seat, and on one occasion even finished a piece of food that his father had started eating but found too difficult to chew.
“The ways in which Xi has gone out of his way to almost perform respect and obedience to his father…is striking," said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, who has written books on Xi.
“Xi [Zhongxun] respected toughness—Jinping was his favorite son precisely because of a belief that Jinping had the most ‘mettle,’" writes Torigian.
Xi Jinping has sought to demonstrate that mettle as China’s leader. He has pursued a more assertive style of diplomacy to advance Beijing’s interests and called on the Chinese people to show grit in adversity such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current trade war with the U.S.
The younger Xi’s forcefulness in cleansing corruption and disloyalty within the party echoes his father’s approach. Notwithstanding his reputation as being relatively liberal, Xi Zhongxun was zealous in implementing Mao’s brutal purges, according to Torigian.
During the 1942-1945 Yan’an rectification drive, a purge that Mao launched to consolidate power, Xi Zhongxun directed an “aggressive hunt for spies" that led to many wrongful persecutions, according to the book. Suspects often made false confessions to avoid torture, sometimes while Xi watched. Entire classes of school children were denounced as enemy agents, Torigian writes.
In the early 1950s, as a senior official overseeing northwestern China, Xi fervently enforced a Mao campaign to hunt counterrevolutionaries, saying that “it is necessary to remember that the more bad people whom we kill, the more they will be afraid."
“Studying his father enables us to understand how Xi [Jinping] would have gained a view on how vicious elite-level politics in China was, and what would need to be done to stay in power," said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London and co-author of a book on Xi’s political ideas.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com