Unity? | Luis Rubio

Luis Rubio

The brew is complicated in itself: an unsatisfied electorate, a culture hardly prone to reaching compromises and considering the rights of others, and a tradition devoted to dividing rather than adding up. The past years have displayed the best and the worst of Mexico’s primitive democratic culture and our scant disposition for venturing into the search for solutions. While the surveys show elevated popularity for presidents while in office (all except for one since the nineties were as popular or more so than the present one), the majority of votes since 1997 have been cast against the incumbent political party, especially governors and presidents. An unsatisfied electorate.

The Morena party and the alliance that the opposition has built share more traits than their members are disposed to admit. That is not strange, in that they respond to factors of culture and tradition that are equal across the board. Morena, as a movement, incorporated citizens of an extraordinary diversity of origin and essential features; the alliance of the opposition embodies historical contradictions due to antagonisms dating back to the thirties of the past century. Forging accords and building lasting mechanisms, but above all efficient ones for the achievement of their objectives (presumably power) has not been simple.

Morena had achieved it because it is able to count on an exceptional factor of unity in the figure of the President, but, as the current internal contest illustrates, the factors that divide are always more powerful than those that unite. In the state of Coahuila, Morena was incapable of avoiding division and low blows among aspirants to the presidential candidacy are more prominent than their attributes.

The case of the alliance is equally revealing: although the opposition overall won more votes in 2021 than Morena, its success was due to a much greater degree to the disappointment and anger of a broad swath of the urban population than to the ability (and willingness) of the political parties to bring their structures to operate together and to assure that their capacity of mobilization would be maximized. The case of the state of Mexico is a proverbial example: there the candidate was nominated by one of the political parties in the alliance and the other members of the supposed alliance essentially abandoned ship.

The difference between the two coalitions (because that is what Morena is) is not as large as it appears. The opposition has been losing ground at the gubernatorial level because of Morena’s thrust with its leadership and its capacity of extortion, but now that Morena is the incumbent (in the presidency and in 23 governorships) it will no doubt begin to undergo the same phenomenon: an unsatisfied electorate. This process will deepen to the extent that the factor of unity in Morena, the President, is relegated to that of second tier.

The point is that the political culture is not naturally compatible with democracy. The country has over several decades dismantled the structures that made the one-party system function, but it has not advanced much in the construction of a new form of governing nor in the development of a citizenry capable of defending its rights and asserting its preferences. While Mexicans have experienced a severe democratic regression during these past few years, the permanence of the current clique in power will be brief, given that structures and scaffolds susceptible to providing continuity were not built. The concentration of power in a sole individual does not constitute an enduring alternative.

All of this suggests that the country is found on the threshold of a new political era, one more like that lived through during the political transition’s first era (the 2000’s) than to the more recent one. But with an enormous difference: the accumulated frustration of decades of unsatisfied promises, saviors who proved incapable of saving anything, and tensions caused by a style of government effective at generating loyalties but not for advancing the country’s development. A complicated brew that will exact outstanding political skills to start over… one more time.

But between today and the moment when that immense challenge must be dealt with, the process of succession will take place, one that shows signs of being not only competitive, but also potentially highly conflictive. The divisive factors will be prominent and the propensity toward conflict even more so. There will be manifested all the deficiencies of the country’s primitive democratic culture: the difficulty in accepting a defeat, the inability to join forces with whoever wins (in both the internal competition and in the constitutional election), and the indisposition for recognizing the merits of the others. On top of this lies the mindset of the clique around the president that believes that a coup is in the works.

The challenge for whomever turns out to be Morena’s nominee will consist of uniting the divergent support bases that sustained each of the contenders. Easy enough to say, but without the factor of unity, the President, this will be remarkably difficult. The challenge for the candidate arising from the opposition will reside in persuading the parties sustaining his or her candidacy to bringing their structures forth, as well as in forsaking the complex tradition of competition and antagonism amongst them, that is explained by history but that, to win, would of necessity have to be abandoned once and for all. Neither candidate will have it easy.

The great democratic advance of Mexico lies in that no one has a sure win: its great deficit lies in that many forces and interests persist that are dedicated to eradicating democracy as a form of government.