Luis Rubio
Paradoxical how in the end they come together. Peña Nieto’s big mistake was not his corruption, however flagrant that was, but his political incompetence. AMLO, the great politician who took advantage of the shortcomings and clumsiness of his predecessor to reach the presidency, never understood what will ultimately defeat him. There, in their mutual arrogance, in their contempt for the citizenry -which did not exist in the world of the sixties or seventies, respectively, in which each of these characters inhabit-, the two presidencies merge. And the consequences will not be entirely different.
Two governments of the old regime in the 21st century will now be replaced by a new generation that will, hopefully, break away from the old ways to project Mexico towards the future.
Peña came to the presidency certain that all his predecessors were incompetent. How was it possible, he surely wondered, that, with so many resources at the disposal of the all-powerful Mexican presidency, the presidents that preceded him had not been able to get the necessary and urgent legislation approved? Beyond the veracity or accuracy of this speculation, there is not the slightest doubt that he undertook to carry out the most ambitious alteration to the constitutional framework since 1917.
All the students who went through the free textbooks of the PRI regime learned that there were three sacrosanct constitutional articles: the third, referring to education; the 27th, referring to the ownership of the resources in the subsoil; and the 123rd, referring to labor and union rights. Although there had been various reforms to these articles over the decades, none compare in ambition and depth to those undertaken by the Peña administration.
What Peña did not understand was that the Mexico of the 21st century required explaining and convincing a skeptical citizenry, that the problem was not merely the constitutional text but the legitimacy among the population of his bills for the progress of the country. Failing to carry out that political task cost him, and the country, a series of good laws that, should they survive AMLO’s final onslaught, will now depend upon the politicized judiciary that emerges. He used an obscure mechanism, the Pact for Mexico, to negotiate in the proverbial smoke-filled room the content of his bills, to later have them approved without any discussion (and with a lot of grease…) in the legislature. The urgent thing was to change the constitutional text, as if what was important, in a country that has seen hundreds of constitutional amendments come and go, was the written word.
The mechanism was pre-modern because it did not correspond to the 21st century world in which Mexico exists today. Certainly, Mexican politics are far from being 100% democratic: according to the polls, only 58% of the people assume themselves as citizens, but their level of information, willingness to debate, and demand to participate in public decisions bears no resemblance to what happened in the 20th century. Only a president rooted in another moment in history, presumably the era of glory of the PRI (the 1960s), could have thought that the problem was “technical,” of merely redrafting the constitutional text.
AMLO is guilty of exactly the same fervor: he wanted to change everything, but, in contrast with Peña, without the technical capacity or slightest concern for end result, so that his achievements are even more modest, but much more pernicious, especially in this, the last month of his administration. Another inhabitant of the 20th century, but of the seventies, AMLO arrived with a mission like that of his predecessor, but in the opposite direction. With a similar zeal and arrogance, as well as ignorance, he devoted himself to eliminating all legislation that hindered his vision of the world: he canceled institutions, eviscerated all counterweights, and did everything possible to recreate his idyllic world of the seventies in which the presidency was almighty. The urgency to modify the legal framework in the last stretch of his presidency leaves a poisoned gift to his successor.
Peña’s mistake was not to socialize the bills that he sent to the legislature, as Salinas had done with such diligence (and success) with NAFTA. Neither he nor his team understood the political significance of the changes that they had promoted, nor did they understand the moment in Mexico or the imperative need to explain and convince the public of the relevance of their initiatives. With absolute arrogance they imposed their vision of the world without worrying about the consequences: without paying attention to the obvious fact that what is easy to approve is also easy to reverse.
AMLO has been a specialist in reversing. De facto and de jure, in reality and on paper, he has dedicated himself to canceling the entire legal and political framework that his predecessors had been building to limit the powers of the presidency and to institutionalize the Mexican government, that is, to build the scaffolding towards an eventual rule of law. Using the powers of the presidency, and AMLO’s extraordinary personal accumulation of power, he imposed his preferences in law, opening the door for a new era of uncertainty and precariousness. Or worse.
The ways followed by Peña and by AMLO are different, but the consequences will be similar. One tried to build towards the future, the other has tried to rebuild the past, but both will see their future disrupted because the Mexico of the 21st century cannot bear that level of irresponsibility, a product of the excess power that the person of the president concentrates and the resources that, although from the Treasury, they have used as if they were their own.
Tough years lie ahead, beginning with the inexorable need to restore harmony, in order to once again restart laying down reliable and credible foundations of institutional solidity.
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