Luis Rubio
“You can observe a lot by just watching” said Yogi Berra, the great baseball icon. There are few things as sobering as the way that campaigns for the presidency are coming to take shape. Times of presidential succession are exceptional moments because they present two contrasting processes: on the one hand, all the political arrangements become tauter, exhibiting cleavage lines and institutional vulnerabilities. On the other hand, there are intervals during which hope is renewed, especially among those aspiring to be part of a new government as well as among those angry and marginalized by the outgoing government. Tension and hope are two potentially transforming elements but only to the extent to which whoever wins possesses the vision and level-headedness necessary to transcend the inexorable pettiness involved in the contest to become a figure of State.
Few achieve this, but the opportunity is immense, at least potentially, for Mexico during this transition from a strong government but one dedicated to polarization, to another much weaker but for which the circumstances could obligate it to build a new institutional scaffolding. It is still too early to come to conclusions, but it is never late to speculate on what could be.
At one moment in the Monty Python film Life of Brian, the revolutionaries opposed to the Romans meet to devise a plan to defeat them; there, a desperate John Cleese asks rhetorically, “What have the Romans ever done for us?!” Abruptly, there arises a great trail of responses proffered by the multitude. In consternation, Cleese again poses his question: “Alright, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans done for us?!” The Romans, like some other civilizations throughout history, changed the world and opened the doors to a new era of human development. I do not expect something similar from the next Mexican government, but there exists a unique opportunity to change the direction of the country toward development, perhaps the first time in three or four decades.
In plain terms, one way of proposing the opportunity is by asking: how can we transition from the regime of the “other data” and “to hell with your institutions” to a regime characterized by an obsession with economic growth and construction of a new institutional framework with a future vision? Ambitious, without doubt, but the circumstances under which the upcoming government will be inaugurated might create an exceptional opportunity for that.
After a strong and polarizing government there will arrive a woman president -whichever of the two it may be- under relatively precarious conditions. Were the trends that we can observe today to materialize, the country in October 2024 (the time of the inauguration of the new government) will be quite different from that of the presidential narrative of the last five years. Instead of abundant funds for subsidizing Pemex and nourishing Morena-party clienteles, the president will find herself with an exhausted budget, a country under confrontation and a very diverse Congress. That is to say, the world of AMLO will have disappeared and with it the capacity of imposition. The dilemma for the president will be very simple: to limit herself to filling potholes -just patching things up- or to negotiate a new schema of a political relationship with the legislature. The former, the natural propensity of all Mexican governments, is always feasible, but the cost of continuing to relegate and marginalize most of the population would be incremental. On the other hand, the opportunity to concertedly confront the basic problems of security, federalism and governance, all of which are crucial for the entire country, will be a one-off, so that everybody begins to focus on activities of high productivity, growth, certainty and, in a word, future.
The current government has wagered on the preservation of poverty as a means of ensuring votes in the present and the future. A new government, less fatuous and vain, should focus itself on the creation of conditions for the country to enter into an era of accelerated economic growth, perhaps one anchored to the exceptional circumstances produced by so-called nearshoring.
As the experience of nations such as Korea, China, Estonia and Poland illustrate, the accelerated growth of the economy entails the extraordinary virtue of becoming the great equalizer, as well as the source of convergence. When a nation starts to experience high growth rates, those that imply political costs, the great obstacles diminish in relevance as the population begins to see the benefits and, above all, to perceive the urgency of joining in the process, demanding solutions to the problems of infrastructure, health, education and so on. That is, accelerated growth facilitates breaking with impediments to economic growth, while at the same time creating conditions, including financing, for rendering it possible.
The point is that it is urgent to break the vicious cycle that the country is now experiencing and that will only be possible to the degree that the new government creates conditions to achieve it. The circumstances under which the new government will come into power will make it doable. The question is whether it will take advantage of the opportunity or persevere in the futility of patchworking.
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