Mid-term elections have weakened Mexico’s president

THE PRESIDENT, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was not on the ballot, but Mexico’s mid-term elections, held on June 6th, were largely a referendum on his polarising performance. Voters selected representatives to the lower house of the national legislature and 30 of the 32 state congresses, as well as governors of 15 states and thousands of local posts. Although Mr López Obrador’s party, Morena, and the parties in its coalition won a majority in the national legislature’s lower house, it lost its two-thirds supermajority. The results are a blow to the president’s ambitions to transform Mexico.

Parties in power tend to lose seats in mid-terms, so the result is not entirely surprising. Morena dropped from 256 of 500 seats in the lower house to around 198. Even with the help of its allies, it falls well below the 334 seats needed for a supermajority. More gallingly for Mr López Obrador, the coalition of established parties did well: the National Action Party ( PAN), which held the presidency from 2000 to 2012, will be the second-biggest political force, followed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party ( PRI), which ruled the country for seven decades until 2000.