MEXICO ELECTORAL LAW REFORMS SPARK DEBATE

Mexico’s elections chief slammed President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s move to cut elections spending as an assault on democracy Thursday — criticism the leftist president dismisses as elitist.

López Obrador said Thursday that he’ll sign the changes into law, even though he expects court challenges. The new law passed late Wednesday would cut funding for the country’s electoral agency and weaken oversight of campaign spending. The president has long said the agency is too expensive and that the money would be better spent on the poor.

The reforms have prompted fierce debate, and opponents already have announced lawsuits and protests in several cities. López Obrador already has taken to branding them as classist, racist defenders of corruption.

“The march is to defend their privileges, they are protesting because don’t want to help the poor,”

López Obrador said earlier this week.

Lorenzo Cordova, the head of the elections agency, the National Electoral Institute, has said the reforms “seek to cut thousands of people who work every day to guarantee trustworthy elections, something that will of course pose a risk for future elections.”

The new law would cut salaries, funding for local election offices and training for citizens who operate and oversee polling stations. It would also reduce sanctions for candidates who fail to report campaign spending.

Cordova warned in a newspaper column published Thursday that the insults being hurled around the issue “aid and assist the authoritarian impulses that are floating around.”

López Obrador was nonchalant about court challenges to the election reforms saying Thursday that he believed they would be upheld because none of it was “outside the law.”