Luis Rubio
NEXOS – January 2018
For a long time it was possible to imagine that the politico-economic transition that Mexicans have experienced would lead to a new level of civilization and development. There was no lack of reasons to think this: while it was evident that the changes and reforms required to make it to the other side of the river were not being carried out, at the onset of the nineties the future seemed promising in that we were ringing in new times in all ambits: the economy was recovering; exports were growing; the middle class was burgeoning, and the elections proffered an active partisan mosaic, inconceivable only a decade or so before. Of course, yellow lights were going off everywhere, but the country appeared to advance in a new direction that was delighting in wide-ranging social recognition.
After years of apparently interminable political disputes, those that had led to the crises of the seventies and to a decade of stagnation and (almost) hyperinflation in the eighties, the political debate entered into a stage of lesser conflict and bellicosity. The liberalization of the economy was bearing fruits, NAFTA was moving forward and the pathway toward the future seemed to be ensured. Years of crisis stayed behind and a guarded optimism reigned.
The beginning of the end came more quickly than could have been foreseen. The crisis of 1995 threw Mexican society into disorder, particularly with respect to its incipient middle class, uncorking a new era of political dispute, the one that now, in 2018, will undergo its third (and last?) electoral confrontation.
In 1996 a new window of hope opened with the unanimous approval of the electoral reform that, it was expected, would usher in a freshly minted democratic epoch. Unfortunately, viewed in retrospect, the successive electoral reforms did not solve legitimacy in terms of access to power and even less the manner of governing us.
Perhaps that would be the greatest deficit of the present: our system of government never adjusted. Arising from post-revolutionary times, with a closed economy, entrepreneurs and unions rigidly controlled and lacking in tolerance for debate or checks and balances, the system did not knuckle under. The structure of the economy changed, the means of access to power were democratized and the capacity of deciding and acting was lost. The old way of governing left off being possible (at least at the federal level) and nothing was substituted for it. The reality is that we are living in a dream because we did not build the scaffolding of a civilized and developed future and not having engaged in this task has opened up all sorts of spaces for regressive forces in all walks of our domestic life.
The world of tomorrow can be of two types: the one that is by force of habit, inertial, and that which is constructed by political decision. Inertia is the easy way out, but not the obvious one due to a very simple, and at the same time paradoxical, reason: the six-year presidential term about to end was simultaneously progressive and reactionary and that rare mixture bequeaths a legacy difficult to emulate. It was progressive in that it drove an agenda of reforms that lay bare great potential opportunities for a more balanced development for the majority of Mexicans. It was reactionary because it devoted itself to reverting institutional headway, eliminating mechanisms of transparency and accountability and violating the few existing counterweights.
This leaves us with a potentially optimistic panorama: the opportunity for casting aside the inertia, to be replaced by an era of building on the reforms effected and whose cost has already been paid, which would imply radically altering the structure of privileges and benefits that all kinds of groups and persons enjoy and that hinders development. The contrast between the South and the North speaks for itself: where socio-political barriers to development are virtually insurmountable under the current paradigm, as in the states of in Oaxaca or Guerrero, opportunity is minimal. If, contrariwise, the next government takes the project of combating those structures of privilege under its wing, the potential for development is literally infinite.
Inertia would imply a sufficiently elevated economic growth rate for the country to function, as done throughout the last three decades: insufficient for achieving a transformation, but satisfactory for dealing with the demand for jobs and for the consequences of our poor socioeconomic structure, translating as it does into poverty. Regarding the political, a scenario of inertia entails incessant conflict, in addition to permanent social dissatisfaction, but not a catastrophic situation. This situation could become complicated if NAFTA disappears.
At the end of the day, the country has accomplished extraordinary, if incomplete, reforms. The reforms unleash huge opportunities; lack of their thorough implementation limits them on a grand scale. We have been in this tessitura for several decades, a circumstance that explains the collective humor characterizing us. I personally am remaining optimistic, in the style of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who observed: “I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who takes a raincoat with him.”
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