Luis Rubio
The presidential race hasn’t even started and it’s already running at full steam. The candidates do their best to grow their presence, attract new voters and respond to the challenges (and tight spots) in which their contenders put them. Despite the excessive noise produced by the interminable spots in the electronic media that the law mandates and all the fuss, this is part of normality in a democratic process. The candidates do what they have to do to raise their visibility, hoping to get the additional vote that would allow them to win. The question is what are the citizens doing to demand answers from candidates. Noisy campaigns without an active citizenship are nothing more than an invitation to the perpetuation of impunity.
Perhaps the most relevant question is where is Mexico today, because only that clarity would allow us to respond to what’s truly the transcendent: how do we fix it. Each of the candidates goes out of his way to advance his message and attack his contenders, but that does not answer the core issue that interests citizens: how is Mexico going to get out of the hole.
By the sheer nature of things, the candidate that emerged from the party that is in the government today has the difficult situation of having to propose something different without moving away from the administration, but has too many heads, none of which understands the anger of the electorate. For their part, the two contenders have the greatest ease to attack the latter and denounce the outgoing administration, without having to propose anything new. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has distinguished himself over all these years for raising some of the most fundamental dilemmas and problems facing the country; his proposals to solve them are vague, many of them absurd and almost all a-historical, but that does not take away the merit of focusing his batteries on real problems such as poverty, inequality and corruption. Ricardo Anaya brought with him a more modern and innovative discourse, but he has dedicated himself to competing for the anti-systemic vote, losing with it his comparative advantage: the liberal legacy of his party, which is what makes him (it) different from the other two. José Antonio Meade has the experience and the vision that would allow him to break with the wrongs that keep the country bogged down, but he can only get there by breaking away with much of what he’s inheriting from the government that he served. None has it easy.
But that perspective is in the abstract. In the real world, the contest is very different from what the polls suggest at this time. A contest of more than two candidates without a runoff has very specific characteristics that determine much of the evolution of the electoral process. The first effect is that of the fragmentation of the vote; a second implication is that some portion of the population, typically close to 10% in our recent past, abandons its candidate if he or she is in the third or fourth place, to avoid an unacceptable result: that is, a portion of the electorate de facto acts as if there were a second round. The third effect is the most transcendent: with the fragmentation of the vote, the threshold of victory decreases, which gives an enormous weight to the hard core vote; that is to say, the contest becomes one in which the partisan machines become critical.
Although all the political parties have their operators and machinery, none has the organization that the PRI has, which, for obvious reasons of Mexico’s history, has a presence even in states and localities where it has not ruled for decades. This implies that if Meade manages to consolidate the PRI base, his probability of winning far exceeds the appearances that the polls reflect.
Of course, the machinery is not everything, but in a contest in which the hard-core base of the electorate is crucial, the machinery acquires an exceptional importance. AMLO has its hard base (which, according to various surveys, hovers around 25%) in a region historically saturated with political operators, clienteles and organizations: the Federal District, the extended Mexico City (mostly in the state of Mexico), parts of Guerrero, Michoacán, etc. The PRI, with the most oiled and spread out machinery, represents a hard core vote, if all those voters actually go to the polls, of around 18%, while the PAN has around 15%. If the PRI vote is joined by the Green and the PANAL, the PRI candidate practically matches AMLO. With these numbers, the real contest would actually concentrate on the additional 5%-6% that the winner would have to achieve straight from citizenship.
This analysis assumes that Meade manages to add up to 100% of the PRI members, starting with those who do not feel represented by the candidate, who is not a member of the party that nominated him, and that all of the PRI operators would act in a coordinated fashion on election day. Without the hard-core PRI vote, the probability of Meade’s success decreases sharply because the citizen vote would be very much dispersed and almost certainly would not be enough to replace the hard core base.
In this context, the Front (PAN and PRD) is faced with a situation that explains the anti-systemic discourse that emanates from its candidate, Ricardo Anaya, as well as the way the Chihuahua governor is playing with fire on (likely) trump charges. With a smaller machinery and a smaller hard-core vote, the only chance of success of this coalition, as was the case in 2006, is that one of the other two candidates fails, commits a blunder or collapses.
None of this guarantees a specific result -in fact, at this point anything is possible- but it does suggests that this race will be nail biting.
@lrubiof