MEXICO CITY (apro).- The majority of the General Council of the National Electoral Institute (INE) voted against the appointment of Flavio Cienfuegos Valencia to occupy the position of head of the Executive Secretariat, which meant a setback for the president counselor Guadalupe Taddei.
Cienfuegos only obtained five of eleven votes in the Council session this Wednesday. To make the appointment a qualified majority of eight votes was required.
Taddei’s second option for the position held by Edmundo Jacobo in the Lorenzo Córdova era was former counselor Adriana Favela, who declined at the last minute.
The president counselor submitted the two names to the plenary for consideration even though neither had the guaranteed votes to access the position, as counselor Carla Humphrey noted in the session.
Taddei presented Favela as the first option for the position, who left the Council last April and whom he described as “Mexican, feminist, former counselor of this collegiate body, promoter of the political-electoral rights of women and of the people who belong to groups in vulnerable situations.
From Flavio Cienfuegos Valencia, he highlighted that he has more than 29 years of professional experience, 18 of which have been in the public sphere, and 12 in electoral matters in various areas of responsibility at the INE.
A minute later, Taddei was sent the letter from Favela announcing his resignation, which he also made known on Twitter, because the “ideal conditions” did not exist.
During the discussion, the representative of the PRI, Hiram Hernández, accused the former president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, of having “kidnapped” the Institute to prevent the appointment to the Executive Secretariat.
“There is resistance from the former Presidential Counselor who left and from his political operator, also a former counselor; How good they even appropriated the citizen marches of February and November, in which the citizens came out to march in defense of the National Electoral Institute. And now, from the outside, they are trying to do very worrying things: first, to kidnap the INE, to provoke an impasse in the INE, for those who are not named today, the Executive Secretary, for example. Kidnap the INE and hold it hostage, because they wanted to put their successors in,” said the PRI member.
Later, counselor Humphrey considered it absurd to put the appointment to a vote even knowing that there was not a majority for its approval.
“Here there were two proposals on the table that had also already been discussed by the councilors and that I want to tell you that neither met the eight votes that they must have in this General Council, neither of the two.
“Bringing to this table to expose the two people knowing that they did not have that qualified majority, seems to me, the truth, nonsense, because we are exposing to this discussion two people who clearly have a professional career that we all must recognize and respect as people,” Humphrey said.
In the session, the INE Council unanimously approved the appointments of the heads of five Executive Directorates, three Technical Units and the Coordination of International Affairs.
In an interview with the media, Taddei denied that the appointment of Cienfuegos was a proposal by the federal government.
“It is a proposal from the president, it is not from anyone else. The Federal Government here cannot come to propose, that is an exclusive attribution of the Presidency.
“For now I know how to say that I do not receive external pressure, that nobody says, that nobody gets involved in this matter, precisely because it is an autonomous body and it must be maintained,” he said.
