MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s ruling Morena party and its allies won a supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies but not in the Senate, the party’s president said on Sunday, falling just short of a two-thirds majority required in both houses. to change the constitution.
The preliminary results of the June 2 vote, which elected Claudia Sheinbaum As Mexico’s first female president with a landslide victory, she showed her Morena party and its allies coming close but losing their two-thirds majority.
Ultimately, the Morena coalition, which includes the Green Party and the Labor Party, will control 83 seats in the 128-seat Senate, just below the supermajority threshold of 85 seats, Morena President Mario Delgado said in a post on social media.
In the 500-member lower house of Congress, the ruling leftist coalition will have 372 seats, above the supermajority threshold of 334 seats, Delgado said.
“With an absolute majority in the Chamber of Deputies and a majority in the Senate, we will deepen the transformation to continue building a country with shared well-being and prosperity,” said Delgado.
Mexico’s INE electoral authority said it would recount 60% of the votes. Mexican opposition leader Xochitl Galvez, who lost to Sheinbaum in the election by about 30 percentage points, called for a recount of 80% of the ballots.
Uncertainty over the composition of the next Congress, which takes office in September, roiled markets last week, since both outgoing left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and President-elect Sheinbaum expressed their support for sweeping reforms in the Constitution.
Potential reforms include eliminating independent energy regulators while consolidating power in the executive branch, as well as an overhaul of the judicial branch that would see Supreme Court justices elected by popular vote.
(Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon and Diego Ore; Editing by Will Dunham)
