The Past | Luis Rubio

Luis Rubio

1982 was a watershed in Mexican political life. For one part of society, that year’s financial crisis constituted an unequivocal sign of the unviability and, in fact, of the collapse of the economic model that the country had followed at least since 1970. For others, during that period the highest economic-growth rates had been reached in history and, had it not been for the excesses on the financial front, the country could have continued along that pathway in permanent fashion. That discussion is still in force because therein lies the heart of the strategy that urges President López Obrador on.

For the president, the problems that the country experiences are the product of the reforms embarked upon from 1982: from his perspective, those reforms derived from an erroneous diagnosis, thus creating the reality of inequality and corruption, which he turned into his standard bearer to win the presidency. What were for some attempts at a solution, for others were the cause of the dilemmas of today.

That diagnostic dispute has been the essence of national politics for nearly four decades and diverse presidential candidates along the route represented contrasting opinions on the trajectory in each electoral vote-casting. A crucial issue in that confrontation of views is whether the 2018 election was the product of a change of perception by most of the electorate with respect to the road the country should pursue. Another no less relevant is whether the current government brings Mexico closer to a solution of the domestic problematic, beginning with the evils that the president himself calls central, specifically corruption, poverty and inequality.

Of course, no one truly knows what motivates each voter when expressing their electoral preference. However, the evidence suggests that there were at least three factors that were definitive in the most recent presidential result: the perception of the corruption of the outgoing administration; being fed up with the lack of results (above all compared with expectations) in terms of growth, social mobility and general well-being; and finally, manipulation of the conditions of competition during the campaign period on judicially giving chase to a candidate and impeding the other from an equitable performance.

A factor that adds another dimension to the time of that election is that of the nature of the reforms that Peña Nieto undertook. Until the arrival of that president no government had dared to recast the three sacrosanct articles of the constitution so intensely and even radically: Peña not only disrupted the three (Article 3 on education; Article 27 on energy; and Article 123 on labor), but also did so without building a coalition with the relevant political supports behind each of these reforms to attenuate the opposition that existed (open or underground), nor did he erect a political and cultural scaffold that would sustain them. That is, he ignored the need to build support for those reforms and obviated all political action despite their enormously ambitious and politically risky nature. Therefore, the innumerable interests affected were not considered or mollified. Many of these then did nothing other than, as the Japanese proverb says, “sit by the river long enough to see their enemy’s body float by.”

If to all this one adds the enormous -and evident- corruption generally accompanying that administration, everything that was lacking was a fuse that would turn that moment into a politico-electoral opportunity. And that fuse was supplied by then-candidate López Obrador, who found himself at the optimal point in time and circumstance to take advantage of it. One needs to go no further than to observe the extraordinary coalition that he rallied under the auspices of the Morena Party to see many of those vested interests affected by Peña watching the enemy float by…

Whatever the comprehensive explanation of what happened in 2018, what is not up for discussion is that President López Obrador is convinced of the need to return to the past during which things, from his perspective, worked well. His entire focus is on the dismantling of everything reformed since 1983, for the sake of recreating the seventies, with the sole exception of minding the fiscal accounts.

In the presidential vision, there is no recognition of how much the world has changed since the seventies or, especially, of the exceptional degree of complexity that characterizes the Mexican economy of today. Nor has there been learning, further than that in the fiscal arena, of the nature of the problems confronting the country today, or of the features of the digital world of the XXI century.

Furthermore, there is not the least intention of enlisting the population in his project. Thus, his future will not be distinct from that of Peña, even if the causes are.

Lord Acton, an English politician and historian of the XIX century, wrote that the objective of a nation and its citizenry should be “to be governed not by the Past, but by the knowledge of the Past – different things.” For President López Obrador no such distinction exists: aside from his clear acknowledgment of the financial immoderation of the seventies, his objective is the recreation of that past just as it was. Much rhetoric but too little learning.