Sheinbaum Morena continuity + judicial-reform consolidation

Doctrine — stated goals and content

Continuity heterodox-populist Morena government following AMLO, with Sheinbaum adding a technocratic-scientific framing (she is a former energy engineer and Mexico City head of government). Economic school: AMLO-continuation — fiscal austerity rhetoric, social-transfer programmes preserved and expanded, state primacy in energy, but with more orthodox communication to markets and a personal willingness to speak to private investors that AMLO avoided. Sits on the centre- left on the economic axis with a pronounced statist tilt on institutional variables. The signature event of the first months was the judicial reform package passed between 4-15 September 2024 (by the outgoing legislature, enacted the day before Sheinbaum's inauguration and carried forward as the governing programme): constitutional amendment making all federal judges — including the Ministers of the Suprema Corte — subject to popular election, with the first extraordinary election held 1 June 2025 renewing the Supreme Court and a large share of the federal bench; reduction of the SCJN from 11 to 9 Ministers; creation of a Tribunal de Disciplina Judicial. Companion constitutional changes passed Oct-Dec 2024: (i) abolition of seven autonomous bodies including INAI (transparency), Cofece (competition), IFT (telecoms regulator), CRE (energy regulator) — their functions absorbed by line ministries; (ii) elevation of the National Guard to armed-forces control (constitutional); (iii) constitutionalisation of social programmes (pensions, scholarships) to restrict future reversal. Fiscal / energy continuity: Plan México industrial strategy launched Jan 2025 with nearshoring framing; Pemex financial support continued; CFE-priority dispatch preserved; minimum wage pathway continued; universal pension indexed. Popularity: Sheinbaum won 2 June 2024 with 59.75% of valid votes (~35.9m votes, widest margin in modern Mexican history); Morena+PT+PVEM took ~364 of 500 Cámara seats (qualified supermajority) and 83 of 128 Senate seats (working super-majority with a single additional vote); Sheinbaum approval has held 65-80% across 2024-2025 per most trackers, briefly rising after her measured public handling of the Trump-era tariff threats and USMCA review preparations. Coherence line: the economic-content direction is continuity with AMLO (state primacy in energy, social-transfer expansion, fiscal orthodoxy on aggregates), while the institutional direction is materially more interventionist — the judicial and autonomous-bodies reforms structurally reshape Mexican separation of powers in ways AMLO advocated but could not pass without the 2024 supermajority. Framework implication: scoring institutional. judicial_independence and institutional.rule_of_law strongly negative is load-bearing for this movement.