AMLO, political scientist and head of state, in front of Montesquieu | Article

Rogelio Muniz Toledo

“Kings who wanted to make themselves absolute
or despotic, always started with
gather in your person all the magistrates”
Montesquieu*

A political scientist by training and a politician by profession, Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the first President of Mexico with a degree in political science and public administration. Having graduated from the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, López Obrador should have a good knowledge of political theory, the history of political thought and the classics of political science.

According to one of the world leaders in the history of political thought, the American political scientist George H. Sabin, Montesquieu was “the most significant of all the French-speaking political philosophers of the eighteenth century (with the exception of Rousseau).” The professional training of Lopez Obrador was to include the study of the classics of political thought, among which Montesquieu could not but be.

As a political scientist, the study of the classics of political science and the theory of the state was to become for López Obrador a source of knowledge and an opportunity to understand the role of the separation of powers in a constitutional state and its regulation in liberal constitutions, the functioning of the mechanism of checks and balances in modern political systems, and the significance of balances of power in constitutional democracy.

As a professional politician involved in the struggle for power and in his activities up to the achievement of the post of head of the Mexican state, the political scientist López Obrador could reflect on these two relevant proposals that Professor Sabin left us in his well. – the famous “History of the Theory of Politics”, a work that the President of the Republic most likely read during his stay at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico: “theories of politics are part of politics itself” and “the theory of “Politics in Action” should get the same treatment as political theory in the books.

As a political scientist, López Obrador may have had views far removed from the work of Montesquieu regarding the importance of the separation of powers for the functioning of a constitutional and democratic state and its role for the proper functioning of modern political systems. And their political values ​​may be closer to the “disregard for the use of immoral means for political purposes and the belief that government is largely based on force and cunning”, which Professor Sabina says characterize Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses on the First Decade. Livio.

López Obrador could even admit that in his professional training he was alien to the works of Montesquieu and his main contribution to general political thought, which, as Professor Sabin points out, consisted in his belief in the importance of institutions that guarantee political freedom, in particular the separation of powers and systems checks and balances between them as “the dogma of liberal constitutionalism”.

As a politician, and especially as head of state, President López Obrador cannot ignore the constitutional mandates that express the political theory of the separation of powers and the role of political institutions such as autonomous constitutional bodies in the functioning of the checks and balances in the political system. For this reason, the lightness and ease with which the President of the Republic refers to the role of the legislative and judicial powers, especially the Supreme Court, which he would like to see as appendages of the executive power, is surprising.

President López Obrador’s announcement that the Congress of the Union and the Supreme Court are joining his political project is contrary to the rules and values ​​of deliberative and constitutional democracy, since this desire is contrary to the Constitution and implies a restriction on the exercise of the constitutional powers of legislators and ministers.

The “proposal” of the President of the Republic to legislators that they should not put a comma in some of their initiatives, and their failed project of having four members of the court “defend the reform project”, a defense which in practice this means preventing the invalidation of laws or unconstitutional acts his government, this demand reflects his disregard for the separation of powers as a political principle and constitutional norm, as well as his desire to concentrate power in the hands of the holder of the executive power beyond constitutional limits.

It may be appropriate to remind the president of what Montesquieu points out in On the Spirit of the Laws: “there is no freedom unless the power to judge is properly separated from the legislative and executive powers”, because “if it is not separated from the executive, the judge could have the power of the oppressor.” And that “everything would be lost if the same person, the same corporation of heroes, the same popular assembly exercised all three powers.”

* Charles Louis de Seconda, Baron de la Brede and de Montesquieu, French philosopher and jurist.