Luis Rubio
The current government is irrefutable proof that the problems facing the country do not depend on the will of the president. When the present government was about to be inaugurated, its main consideration lay in how to rebuild the state’s capacity for action. It was evident that the ability to govern had been deteriorating and that no country could prosper with a weak, incompetent and paralyzed government, as well as being overwhelmed by factors beyond its control. The proposal of an “effective government” summed up its vision in a clear way, but also showed its limitations: it implied the idea that the what existed could be recovered, that is, nostalgia drove its thinking to what had worked decades before.
In this, the Peña Nieto government is not exceptional. The same arguments that were put forward in the campaign of 2012 can now be heard from the side of Morena: before things worked, today everything is a disaster. Are these two PRIistas, one of ancestry, the another of history, right? The reality is that there are many things that work well in the country and that fully justify the reforms and transformations that have been experienced over the last four or five decades. Of course, there are parts of the country that lag behind and innumerable problems, imbalances and obstacles persist, but any objective observation would reveal the obvious: the challenges ahead are enormous, but the potential, as well as thee point of departure, are exceptional.
In 1968, iconoclastic Samuel Huntington made waves when he asserted that “the most important difference between nations refers not to their form of government but to their degree of government.” That statement, published at the height of the cold war, continued with other heresies, such as that the United States and the Soviet Union had more in common than any of them with nations from Africa or Latin America. The point of the author was that, beyond ideologies and forms of government, some nations had the capacity to govern themselves and others did not.
So, Where is Mexico in that dimension? When President Peña proposed an effective government or when Andrés Manuel López Obrador promises a government capable of getting the country out of its rut, they speak of a system of government that existed half a century ago and was capable of implementing the decisions that were made at the top. That is, both public figures conceive the function of governing as the capacity to impose their decisions. They speak of a competent and institutionalized government and idealize the old PRI system but, in reality, they refer to an authoritarian system where its two key pieces -the presidency and the party- complemented each other to maintain a tight but legitimate control over the population, making it easy to govern. As the past five years have shown, that system no longer exists and, more importantly, it cannot be recreated.
The partisan or ideological banner is irrelevant: the claim that one can return to that idyllic world is simply absurd. The challenge facing Mexico is to create a new political system, appropriate to the circumstances of the 21st century. Porfirio Díaz stated that “to govern the Mexicans is like herding turkeys on horseback;” the PRI thought that authoritarian controls had solved this complexity, but today it is clear that the problem is not of individuals but of structures and institutions.
Regardless of whether or not the NAFTA remains or is killed, the country’s core deficit is its inability to govern itself. NAFTA made it possible to pretend that, with the effective guarantees for investment and with the basis of trust provided by that instrument, it was possible to avoid having to reform the system of government. Today we are in the worst of all worlds: facing the risk of losing NAFTA and against an election in which nobody is focused on the real problem facing the country. Instead of debating the problem of governance, our true deficit, we live the noise of worn-out and outdated rhetoric about how to return to the past or how to protect what exists. The true promise of AMLO, like that of EPN, is a benign authoritarianism: I can do it because I am strong.
What Mexico needs are not strong and enlightened men but effective institutions. That requires a willingness of our political class to face the structural problems of the country which have now been stripped naked by Trump by making it clear that we do not have Plan B nor ability to articulate one, because we did not do our homework for the past twenty-five years. The NAFTA was a very effective and intelligent means to solve a core problem (like stabilizing the country and conferring certainty to the population and to the investors), but it is not enough to achieve an integral development and exposes us, as we now know, to the avatars of the US, which was supposed to have strategic permanence.
The country requires a new system of government, anchored in the citizenship and in effective institutions and mechanisms. Today we have an absurd combination of old, obsolete and illegitimate institutions with endless demands for the government to act and respond. We have to find a way to tie both: government capacity and legitimacy.
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