Mexico’s judicial purge: A radical cure South Africa should study
While Washington clutches its pearls over elected judges, Mexico is asking the question Pretoria keeps dodging: Who do courts actually serve?
Establishment consensus on Mexico’s 2025 judicial elections goes something like this: a populist government fired every judge in the country, replaced them with political loyalists through sham elections, and opened the courthouse doors to cartel infiltration. It is a tidy story. Maybe a little paranoid. But it’s also incomplete.
On 1 June 2025, roughly 13 million Mexicans voted to fill 881 federal judicial positions, including nine seats on the Supreme Court. Turnout was a paltry 13%. Ruling party-backed candidates swept every Supreme Court seat. No winning candidate received more than 5% of the vote.
The opposition called it a farce. President Claudia Sheinbaum called Mexico “the most democratic country in the world.”
The question Mexico forced into the open, the one that should matter to South Africans watching the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) interviews resume on 13 April 2026 in Gauteng, is textured. When “independence” becomes code for “because I said so,” what breaks first: court or country?
Jurassic judges: the saga continues
The American establishment recoils at the idea of elected judges. The critique is familiar: judicial independence requires insulation from politics. A judge that doesn’t have to worry about winning an election, will make decisions based on the law rather than what is popular. Rule of law demands expertise over popularity. Apply that logic to the United States, and it curdles fast.
American Supreme Court justices now serve an average of 28 years, the longest tenures in the country’s history. Oh, and they’re appointed for life, which in practice means they outlast the political era that produced them, often by decades.
Two-thirds of Americans support 18-year term limits. Congress has done nothing. The Brennan Center, Fix the Court, and a bipartisan panel of legal scholars have all endorsed the same reform. And so, judicially speaking, constipation is baked in.
The court itself, rocked by ethics scandals involving undisclosed luxury trips and billionaire benefactors, commands less public trust than at any point in modern polling. The “dinosaur on the bench” has become the symbol of institutional rot: unelected officials serving decades-long terms, frozen in the moral and political amber of a bygone era, like, you know, last decade. And what occasionally reeks of bias.
It’s not independence
The US model is therefore perhaps best viewed as calcified as opposed to robustly “independent” per se. Justices game their retirements to ensure ideological successors. And confirmation hearings, once the most soporific of C-SPAN viewing, often resemble congressional Hunger Games editions.
Who, for example, can forget the Kavanaugh edition, him eventually saying, “This is a circus.” Indeed, sir.
In 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination for 293 days, refusing hearings or a vote to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Citing a “principle” to not let voters decide in an election year, McConnell argued the next president should fill the vacancy, a move he later called one of his most consequential actions. That’s one word for it.
Four years later, McConnell conveniently abandoned that principle entirely, ramming through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation just weeks before the 2020 election. His manoeuvre was not subtle. It was a brazen demonstration of an appointment process that had become a contest of timing and leverage, not merit or, God forbid, independence.
A cynical move, at least
But McConnell’s larger project was structural. By prioritising young, ideologically reliable nominees across the federal bench, he ensured that one Senate leader’s political moves and rhetorical gymnastics would shape American law for a generation.
The judges weren’t elected. Nor did they campaign. But they were political products all the same, selected for reliability on issues from abortion to regulatory power. Appointment, it turns out, does not guarantee or imply judicial autonomy despite what was said during hearings.
Mexico looked at this model, looked at its own judiciary riddled with nepotism and what former Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar described as a “legitimacy deficit,” and chose demolition over renovation. And sure, whether that was wise is debatable. That it’s understandable is not.
The ‘institutional memory’ trap
When South Africa’s JSC deliberates on judicial appointments, the concept of “institutional memory” carries enormous weight. A candidate’s ability to maintain “continuity” on the bench is treated as a virtue.
In theory, this preserves legal coherence. In practice, it functions as a filter that rewards a specific pedigree, one shaped by decades of elite, historically white legal circles, and treats “knowing the system” as synonymous with merit.
The Zondo Commission exposed what “institutional memory” looked like inside South Africa’s security and legal apparatus: experienced officials using their deep knowledge of the system to facilitate state capture, not prevent it.
When President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered mandatory lifestyle audits and re-vetting of senior SAPS officials in his 2026 State of the Nation address, the subtext was unmissable. Experience had become a liability, not an asset.
The JSC’s own criteria have started to shift. Its updated selection guidelines now foreground “sensitivity to social context,” a criterion that sounds like bureaucratic filler until you realise it’s the JSC’s quiet admission that three decades of post-apartheid appointments have not produced a bench that reflects the country’s lived reality.
What Mexico’s 2025 judicial elections show
Mexico’s judicial overhaul was, to be polite, sloppy. Voters faced ballots listing over 80 candidates for nine Supreme Court seats, with almost no public information about who they were. Civil society groups identified roughly 20 candidates with credible links to organised crime, including a former lawyer for Sinaloa cartel co-founder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Mexico’s ruling party, Morena, distributed illegal voting guides. Academic analysis from Duke University’s Judicature journal found a significant drop in legal experience among newly elected judges compared to their predecessors.
These are serious failures. But fixable. Problems of design rather than principle.
The principle Mexico asserted, that a judiciary which answers to nobody eventually serves nobody, is hard to dismiss.
For South Africans who have watched an aging judicial elite struggle to interpret the complexities of “Transformative Constitutionalism” within the GNU’s power-sharing framework, Mexico is more than a cautionary tale of cartel capture. It is a live experiment in dismantling the ivory tower that shields the status quo from the ballot box.
The GNU needs judges who read the room
South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) is a fragile, multi-party open marriage trying to reconcile competing visions on land reform, economic redress, and basic service delivery ahead of the 2026 municipal elections.
It hardly needs a judiciary frozen in a more conservative era, citing precedents from a political landscape that no longer exists.
Rather, it would benefit from judges capable of interpreting the Constitution with the agility demanded by coalition governance. Fewer populist judges. More responsive ones.
Mexico’s example, electing judges wholesale through a process designed to favour the party du jour, is a risky move. But it alleviated, maybe too explosively, the obstruction.
South Africa’s judicial system is at least starting question itself, albeit with such institutional caution, movement may have to be measured in millimetres.
April’s JSC interviews will tell us if those increments are adding up. Or whether “institutional memory” is still winning the argument against the future.