Luis Rubio
What would make a government successful: the consensus or the results? The government of President Peña won an election legitimately, which would allow it to govern with full endorsement. However, Peña has been working to bring the opposition forces into a political pact with his own PRI: that is, he prefers a consensus to a legislative majority. Without doubt, a government that achieves transforming a country with the support of the whole of the relevant opposition parties would break with decades of deadlock and pessimism and would afford new impetus to development. And it is precisely for this reason that this is quite unlikely to occur. But not for this should the effort be abandoned: yet the president should ensure that the search for consensus does not paralyze end up paralyzing his government.
There are two ways of conceiving of a consensus. One, as statesman Abba Eban once declared, “a consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually”. On the other hand, the philosopher Maimonides affirmed that “the truth does not become truer if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it”. The Pact that achieved articulating the government broke with years –or decades- of recriminations, established a common agenda in which all Mexicans can participate and dealt a sense of direction to the government itself. The leaders of the parties who accepted to join forces behaved as statesmen, but it is also necessary to recognize that they assumed the enormous risk that the wager agreed upon regarding the transition would fail. Taken together, it is impossible to minimize the political and symbolic value of the masterstroke.
Nicos Poulantzas, a political philosopher, said that alliances suffice as long as they satisfy the objectives and interests of those participating in them and that the winner is always the one who breaks them first. On pursuing this logic, the PAN as well as the PRD would be running the tremendous risk of being used by the government mercilessly because, save for a catastrophic error, there’s no way that, in a presidential system, the opposition could amass sufficient power to be equal to or overtake the president. On the other hand, the existence of a basic agreement on the direction of development is ideal for the president –and the country. It’s a win-win situation. Would there be a way to reduce the risk for everyone while simultaneously constructing on the platform of the pact?
Let’s begin at the beginning: Why procure a consensus? Given the polarization that has characterized the political debate in general and on development in particular –crisply reflected on the electoral plane-, the answer would appear obvious. However, in reality this concerns a political artifice of dubious validity. Of course, the existence of a shared course constitutes an asset of immense worth for the country because it confers certainty on the citizenry and the business community, thus creating development opportunities that are inconceivable under other circumstances. At the same time, no one is served by a straightjacket that leads the government to postpone the reforms it considers priorities -as has been happening- or that entail civil war within each of the opposition parties.
The search for consensus derives from the origin of the PRI. As the coalition of an array of dissimilar forces, the old PNR (PRI’s predecessor founded in 1929) constructed mechanisms –starting with the “unwritten rules”- for processing decisions and maintaining a semblance of unity. But the true strength of the consensus was the regime of loyalties that maintained all PRIists focused on the promise of eventual assumption of power or access to the wealth (i.e. corruption). As long as the system complied in a sufficient number of cases in keeping the promise believable, the consensus was unbreakable.
Things changed with the fiscal crises and the economic hecatomb of the seventies and eighties. The definition of consensus changed: as the PRIist governments lost their legitimacy the need for support from outside the party lead to alliances outside PRI. In that era, it became possible to advance only with the cooperation or the opposition -mostly with the PAN. The product of this stage, certain key reforms, especially electoral reforms, eventually led to equitable electoral competition. That era concluded with the defeat of the PRI in 2000. Today the Peña-Nieto government enjoys full legitimacy, originating directly from the ballot box and does not require consensus to be able to function: a legislative majority should suffice. In fact, in a democratic system, the quest for consensus reflects one of two circumstances: that the government does not feel legitimate or that it seeks the support of the opposition parties through the pact to reduce its own costs or to dilute the reforms that it is presumably negotiating.
Whatever the case, in its current form, the pact will probably not withstand the inherent tensions. If the government intends to “blame” the PAN or the PRD of what corresponds to it, these parties will end up going their own way; one possible indication of this are the alleged electoral alliances (at state level) for this year. On the other hand, if the objective is to water down the reforms for the benefit of the de facto powers close to the PRI, the result will be catastrophic for the government itself, which will fail in its purpose to accelerate the growth of the economy. In other words, the collapse of the pact would be advantageous for no one –starting with the government. The question is how to avoid it.
The solution might be found in something that Maurice Duverger, a political theorist, explained decades ago: to conceive of the pact not as a straightjacket but rather as an arrangement between the government and the “loyal” opposition, a term he employed to identify parties that recognize the legitimacy of the government but that compete openly for the power. That is, there is a need to increase the flexibility of the notion of the implications of subscribing to the pact so that all those participating in it share the general objective and the agenda but do not need to be part of every single legislative vote to implement it. Circumstantial legislative alliances would make it possible to advance the agenda without risking the pact. With such an arrangement all run the same risk and all share the potential benefits. The pact becomes more equitable, thus functional.
The idea of the pact is brilliant. It permits creating an environment of trust and consensus. It breaks, in one accord, with a decade and a half of botched encounters and polarization. At the same time, it establishes a passageway that all parties and political forces can make their own. But no pact can be a substitute for the government or for the responsibilities –and costs- of governing. The pact constitutes an investment on the part of all of the co-signers, but above all on the part of the opposition parties, who know that they can be left hanging from a thread at any moment.
It is possible that the government harbors the hope that the pact will serve to avoid carrying out reforms or to make them less costly for its constituencies: the unions and other so called veto or de facto powers. Were it thus, sooner or later the government would end up banging its head against the wall. There’s no progress without investment and there’s no investment without risk. There are ways out, but only if the government recognizes that the way it’s going won’t get it there
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