Luis Rubio
The end of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador opens a new stage for the Mexican political system. In the last half-century, Mexico went from a highly structured system around a political party that was also a complex system of participation and control to a shallow democracy with weak institutions that have now been seriously eroded, if not destroyed. Thanks to the strength of his personality and political skill, López Obrador maintained the cohesion of Mexican politics in general and of his party in particular, which hid the severe and accelerated political degradation behind the scenes. Now, with the succession resolved, the risks and fractures with which the winner of the election and the country in general will have to deal will become evident. The outgoing president planned to concentrate, consolidate, and exercise power, his personal power, but not for the future of the country.
The great magic of the old political system lay in the expectation that there would always be a new opportunity to reinvent the country with the change of governments. The mechanism was inherent in the political structure derived from the pacts that shaped the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, the “grandfather” of the PRI) and which, much later, Cosío Villegas would call a “non-heritable sexennial monarchy.” The critical factor lay in the fact that the power of the president was not disputed but at the same time had limited validity, so the country could reinvent itself in the next round, which yielded a factor of certainty during the six-year term, but of absolute uncertainty regarding the future: the only thing that remained was the hope that the next government, by reinventing the wheel, would solve the problems, the new and the ancestral ones, and create opportunities for the future. Authoritarian or not, the system worked for several decades because it allowed a change in the political elite and preserved the hope for a better future. At the end of each six-year term, the same concerns were debated: from the role or influence of the outgoing president to the stability of the economy. Nothing has changed in that, except the dimensions of what is at stake, but that difference – the additional degree of uncertainty – is entirely due to the outgoing president.
When a government was bad, it was stated that “no evil lasts six years, and no people can stand it.” When it was good, the citizenry rewarded it with a favorable vote in the successor’s election. The process was dynamic and demonstrated a high degree of understanding on the part of the so-called “revolutionary family” of both its mission as a provider of conditions for economic growth and its concern for citizen sentiment. The political system of the time was not democratic (nor did it pretend to be), but it evidenced a recognition of the need to act in response to the needs of the citizenry. Above all, the “system,” whose heart lay in the presidency-PRI binomial, was sustained by the PRI, the institution that conferred continuity, control, and discipline.
Over the decades, each president pursued economic strategies that sought to respond to the circumstances of the moment, and, for much of the 20th century, those circumstances were relatively simple compared to today’s world, facilitating an essentially introspective view. The combination of concentrated power around the presidency and the ability to modify government strategies according to the president’s reading of the specific moment had significant consequences. In fact, this characteristic made the rulers directly responsible to the population for the future of their government because, when their actions were successful, they were rewarded by the electorate; however, when the results of their administration failed due to their own actions or for ignoring the international context (as occurred in the seventies and early eighties), the cost was borne entirely by those presidents, who suffered widespread opprobrium after their government. Claudia Sheinbaum’s election result leaves no room for doubt about where Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be at the end of his term.
Good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, popular or not, the presidents of yesteryear did not take a step without a huarache: when the time of succession came, they resorted to transactional mechanisms to ensure a favorable vote, in addition to employing all the electoral fraud mechanisms necessary to ensure an overwhelming triumph. Indeed, PRI victories were legendary, frequently reaching votes exceeding 80% of the total vote (and in 1976, there was not even an opposition candidate competing with José López Portillo). The use of government handouts in exchange for votes is not exceptional when looking at the rest of the world (the nature of the exchange varies, but not the fact itself), while systematic fraud of the sort that came to take place in some elections in the mid-20th century certainly was. Today, in 2024, we find ourselves in another stage of Mexican politics in which political competition is real, and the rules for the administration of the electoral processes and the qualification of the election are the product of autonomous entities that enjoy broad legitimacy and widespread recognition. This, of course, does not prevent the presence of all kinds of deceptions to influence how citizens vote, but these occur mainly outside the scope of the National Electoral Institute.
The country’s political reality is one of deep contrasts -for example, very successful regions and other very backward ones- but today, there is a wealth of information regarding these circumstances that would have been inconceivable only a few decades ago. Today, the channels of communication that facilitate public discussion of national issues favor the advance and retreat of political and partisan options, as well as the emergence of citizen candidacies, something also difficult to imagine in the recent past. Of course, Mexico is far from a consolidated democracy, a widely successful economy, or a minimally satisfied society. Still, it is no longer the self-absorbed, isolated, and poor nation of a few decades ago. In a word, the political reality of the country has changed dramatically, except for the current president’s attempt to return to the most primitive and condemnable practices of the past, including the agenda of constitutional reforms he proposed on February 5, 2024, whose common denominator consists of constitutionally strengthening the presidency and reducing the mechanisms for counterbalancing and protecting the citizenry from State actions.
This is the only way to explain his crusade and unbridled activism to guarantee the electoral result of his preference, for which he was clearly willing to use any resource, starting with the purchase of votes, followed by the control of the institutions and entities responsible for the conduction, administration, and qualification of the election, essentially the National Electoral Institute (INE), as well as the respective Tribunal. In the same sense, he used the presidential pulpit to promote his messages and his candidates and to attack and disqualify any dissent or criticism. In light of the outcome of the presidential election, it is evident that his crusade was successful in terms of the victory achieved by his candidate, leaving the determination of the broader consequences of his actions to the future. This confirms that the presidential actions throughout the six-year term had the primary objective of achieving this success. What remains to be elucidated is whether his investment in sources of loyalty to himself will have additional implications.
The Strategy
The first indication that President López Obrador’s six-year term would be different from that of his predecessors was evident from the moment his disinterest-indeed, radical opposition to promoting economic growth became clear. In contrast to all his predecessors since the end of the Mexican Revolution more than a century ago, President López Obrador does not conceive of government or power as an instrument for the country’s economic development. While all of his predecessors focused on promoting economic activity, some with more success than others, this government’s priority, from the beginning, was the succession of 2024 and nothing else. For the president, the objective and rationality of his government were merely power and guaranteeing a safe succession that would continue with his way of seeing the world. Now, in the twilight of the six-year term, the country will have to begin to understand and deal with the consequences of such a poorly institutionalized government for the future of the country.
The formal structure of the division of powers of the Mexican political system did not correspond to the reality of power that characterized it throughout the 20th century. While there was a judiciary and a legislature, the dominance of the executive branch was legendary. However, this dominance was tempered by the existence of the official party, whose institutional structure favored the turnover of elites and the continuity of power. The famous British call that “the king is dead, long live the king” was reproduced in the Mexican system in an (almost) natural way, allowing the assumption of power and the definition of its limits. In recent decades, for various reasons, Mexico has experienced the extinction of this political control and institutional structure, presumably to be replaced by a democratic system that was never fully consolidated. Because of this, important questions remain that only time will elucidate, beginning with the power of the outgoing president after his successor is inaugurated and the potential emergence of competitive power structures in the form of regional or national caudillos. In other words, institutional weakness is now gaining new momentum as an issue of paramount importance.
AMLO and the Economy
One of the paradoxes of the six-year term that ended lies in the economy’s growth. Although the president opted for a strategy that expressly refrained from promoting growth (and the public and private investment that would have been necessary to achieve that result), the circumstances of the country and the world translated into relatively unusual growth rates in the second half of the presidential term. In the administration’s first year, the economy did not grow, and then came the pandemic, which severely contracted economic activity; however, by the fourth year, the economy began to accelerate to 3.1% in 2023. This figure is slightly higher than the 2.5% average experienced over the past three decades, but what is significant is that previous administrations devoted enormous financial, bureaucratic, and human resources to investment promotion. However, in a paradox of history, it was the president who did not carry out such investments (and opposed them) who benefited from those decades of reforms and who is now seen especially in the strength of the export sector (especially manufacturing, agribusiness and mining), which functions independently of (some would say despite) government activity. In fact, this should not be surprising: the main objective of negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement at the beginning of the 1990s was to depoliticize investment decisions. The aim was to provide certainty to investors that future Mexican governments would not change the rules of the game thanks to the existence of an international treaty. The paradox is that the greatest beneficiary of that treaty and the reforms that followed was the president, who opposed the reforms and consistently denounced them.
Throughout the López Obrador administration and despite the rhetoric that “the poor come first”, for the president, the poor were merely an electoral instrument because reducing poverty was against his succession objective. Although it may seem contradictory, the president, a connoisseur of power, chose to ensure his succession not by improving the population’s living standards but by building a structure of loyalties that would guarantee that the population owed its vote to the president or to whomever he chose. While an improvement in disposable income for families obviously contributes to reducing poverty, the subsidies that the president sought in cash transfers followed a political logic, not an economic one. Getting out of poverty would imply entering the labor market in such a way that this exit would acquire permanence and a gradual increase in both the income and the capital of the members of the family that was once in poverty (an objective that, at least nominally, was pursued by programs of previous six-year terms, such as Progresa, Prospera and the like). In a word, a strategy to break with poverty – especially in the digital era – requires sustained economic growth and the availability of means to increase people’s social capital, especially education and health.
President López Obrador’s strategy had a different objective: the improvement of family income through direct cash transfers that, by definition, would lessen the symptoms of poverty, but would not diminish it; instead, it implied a relationship of dependency. There is no contradiction in this: the objective was to create dependency on the government that would translate into loyalty to the person of the president, which required that the “structural,” so to speak, situation of people in poverty not change. The rationale for this logic was very clear and conscious: in the words of Morena’s president at the beginning of the six-year term, “When you take people out of poverty, and they become middle class, they forget where they come from, because people think the way they live.” In short, the poor are a reserve of votes, and the last thing that suits Morena is to have fewer poor people and more middle-class people because those people stop conceiving themselves as “people” to think as citizens. Economic growth ends up being a curse for the only objective that allegedly motivated this administration: to ensure the triumph in 2024.
The economic evolution of the six-year term that concluded has not been exactly as the president planned it, at least according to the conception outlined by the president of Morena mentioned in the previous paragraph. First, the cash transfers made by the government, but in the name of the president, as if it were his own money, have had the effect of improving the lives of the people who appear in the census that the president and his team built (whose formal criteria and nominal list are not public). In other words, the transfers have successfully strengthened the individuals and families who are beneficiaries of these programs (seniors, youth, and other target audiences). Still, dependence on the government, which is the express objective, is preserved. As the attached graph illustrates, the increase in the population’s consumption throughout the second half of the six-year term is clear evidence of the success of the presidential strategy. It explains, at least in part, the loyalty experienced by the president during these years on the part of the benefited population and, of course, their vote last June 2nd.
Secondly, the increase in the minimum wage promoted by the president benefits the entire population within the formal economy, raising the real disposable income of an important segment of the citizenry. The transfers and the minimum wage modified the population’s perceptions and probably constituted an important factor in explaining the president’s popularity. However, although he benefits from these actions, the dynamics of each of them are different: while the cash transfers have a direct and tangible electoral objective, the minimum wage increase is more difficult to politicize because its beneficiaries are generic, not specific; that is, all those who earn a minimum wage benefit, not only those who are within Morena’s electoral roll. One way or another, the average population has experienced an improvement in its real income after inflation, which also explains the increase in consumption at the popular level.
The Economy and Votes
The governments of yesteryear -from the Revolution to 2018- sought votes through two paths: on the one hand, they sought to adopt economic and investment strategies that would translate into significant economic improvement that would, in turn, raise living standards and thus satisfy the population, trusting that this would translate into a favorable vote for the outgoing government. From the rural infrastructure development programs in the 1930s to the highway construction program, the expansion of the electrical grid, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, to cite three very different types of strategies, all governments sought to accelerate the economy’s growth. The success of the first decades after the end of the Revolution can be seen not only in the growth of the economy itself but also in social mobility, the growth of cities, and, with them, of an incipient middle class. Just as there were highly successful governments (those of the era known as “stabilizing development” between the forties and the beginning of the seventies stand out), there were also those whose ambitions were much more significant than their capacity to lead the national economy, as occurred in the seventies, which culminated in the foreign debt crisis of 1982. In this sense, some of those governments were highly successful, while others provoked terrible crises. Still, there was not a single one that had not followed the logic of progress through economic growth, similar to what one could observe almost anywhere on the planet.
The government of President López Obrador broke with that rationality. Convinced that the country’s problems began with, and are a product of, the reforms undertaken since the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s, the president set about rebuilding the idyllic world of his memory as a PRI leader in his home state of Tabasco. The central elements of his vision are summarized as: a strong presidency that decides without limitation by autonomous or regulatory bodies; PEMEX as the main source of demand in the economy; economic power subordinated to political power; and the construction of a hegemonic party, for which it is legitimate to use all the resources of the State. What was never clear in the presidential project before his inauguration in 2018 was the abandonment of the developmental project characteristic of all presidents throughout the twentieth century.
For the president, the only important thing was his succession project, an objective for which all the resources and capacities of the government were allocated, starting with the most successful of all, the so-called “mañanera,” a daily exercise of communication and manipulation of public opinion that achieved and consolidated the high level of popularity enjoyed by the president, even when the economy, security, health and education, among other key factors for the life of the citizenry, experienced serious deteriorations.
In this context, how the government sought to ensure presidential succession relied on political rather than economic initiatives. Consequently, everything done throughout the six-year term followed a strictly electoral logic: where are the votes and how to ensure that government programs make them dependent on government handouts, but always in the president’s name. Transfers to senior citizens, youth, and other target audiences had a strictly political logic, and the evidence shows that poverty was not one of the relevant criteria. In other words, the narrative was integrated with a discourse of fighting poverty, but the government’s strategy was much more direct as if it were a laser beam: to secure votes. Whether the combination of discourse, narrative, and transfers will succeed remains to be seen.
Unlike his predecessors, the president sought to build a platform of dependence on his person; similar to his predecessors, he developed a series of mechanisms dedicated to buying votes. In the post-revolutionary era, many governments sought votes following a transactional logic: candidates invented all sorts of mechanisms to exchange favors for votes. In one era, they distributed household goods; in another, they distributed breakfasts or food, all in exchange for the promise of a vote; more recently, they invented cards that produced cash in ATMs. The mechanics were facilitated, at the same time that the degree of certainty of the effectiveness of the exchange was raised, with the appearance and generalization of the use of cellular telephones, since with that, the providers of benefits exchange the favor for the photograph of the vote itself. Whatever the mechanics, ancient or modern, the purpose was always transparent. Regardless of the performance of the outgoing government, the candidate offers an “incentive” for the voter to respond favorably on election day. If one adds the two together, the electoral project acquires an inexorable political meaning.
Many of the electoral strategies that characterized the PRI era of the 20th century were eradicated by the electoral reform of 1996, which legislated (with the unanimous approval of all the political forces of the time) the creation of not only an autonomous authority dedicated to the administration of the elections and the qualification of the election. With this, all kinds of devices well known by Mexicans throughout the 20th century disappeared, some with peculiar names (such as the “crazy mouse”), but all of them aimed at achieving the expected result through the manipulation of the electoral roll, the factious use of the media or the abuse of governmental instruments to close the opposition’s way. With the 1996 reform, all these practices were prohibited. Although what followed was not perfect, it constituted a scheme of impeccable fairness for electoral competition, as shown by the innumerable alternations of parties in power at all levels of government. One of the questions raised by the recent election is whether these judgments are still valid: the result was so overwhelming that it opens a vast range of possibilities, much of it potentially regressive.
The electoral reform referred to, in its constitutional component, was unanimously approved by all political forces of the time, except for the PRD, Morena’s predecessor, which refused to vote in favor of the secondary legislation. That is to say, there was always a reticence, if not skepticism, within the contingent that today leads Morena concerning the electoral legislation and the institutions that emanate from it. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that López Obrador refused to recognize the 2006 electoral result and that he and a good part of his followers continue to argue that his defeat resulted from electoral fraud. Twelve years later, the president confronted the INE board on repeated occasions, and through the appointment of people loyal to him, he devoted himself to weakening, if not subjugating, the electoral authority to his preferences. This closes the siege built by the president, which includes all the elements he was structuring to ensure his victory in the June 2024 elections: the narrative, the money transfers, the electoral authority, and his own political activism and control of a large part of the country’s institutional apparatus.
The Polls
Another enigma that only time will allow to clarify lies in the enormous variance -highly different preferences among them- in the different pollsters’ results throughout the electoral process. In addition to this, decades after the country began to have professionally managed electoral processes and a significant improvement in the living standards of the population, the six-year term that now concludes has created a paradox that only time will allow to clarify in full: while the number of people who assume themselves as citizens grows, loyalty to the president due to his narrative and social programs also strengthens. Will this be a contradiction? An incongruity? Time will tell.
According to a survey by Alejandro Moreno (El Financiero, May 2, 2023), sixty percent of Mexicans say they are satisfied with their lives, have seen their real income grow, and have a job. The same 60% support the president and consider that his administration has made possible the stability and well-being they enjoy. On the other hand, the remaining 40% disapprove of the president’s management because they consider that it is damaging the foundations of future welfare and threatening the prospects for growth and well-being. One wonders what makes two groups in the same society have such radically contrasting perceptions of the same phenomenon or historical moment. According to Moreno, the fundamental difference between the two groups of Mexicans is the level of schooling: while the university vote was crucial in the president’s election in 2018, today, that cohort represents the most critical segment of their work. The two most substantial contingents underpinning the president’s popularity are older Mexicans and people with less schooling. The inescapable conclusion is that those most disadvantaged in their income and prospects for life and employment have benefited from economic stability, growth in real disposable income, and a labor market that, post-pandemic, has offered greater employment opportunities. At the same time, this logic carries the seeds of its own future dysfunctionality, given that the most dynamic economy with the best prospects is one linked to the information economy, which, by definition, requires a radically different type of education than the one favored by the president. Another paradox: poor but with spending power, a recipe for a single election.
Twenty-eight years after the landmark 1996 electoral reform, the country has advanced in certain aspects but has regressed in many others and, thanks to the laws (and tactics) promoted by the government in electoral matters (the famous “Plan B,” followed by “Plan C”), the likelihood of further deterioration in both political and security matters can no longer be discounted. The outstanding achievement in electoral matters -certainty about the process, but not about the outcome- could well be reversed in an attempt to impose an outcome regardless of the electorate’s will. That reform, a great citizen triumph -perhaps the greatest in our history- could be seeing its last days.
And this is all the more important in light of how little progress Mexican democracy has made in all other areas. Although progress was made in electoral matters from 1997 onwards (the first federal election after 1996, already with an “even floor”), the country could hardly be called democratic when no more than 58% of the electorate* claims to be citizens (versus 42% who assume themselves to be “people”), hardly a majority willing (and able) to defend their rights. More to the point, no one could seriously argue that the country enjoys peace, a path towards greater equality of opportunities, an effective system of government, “prompt and expeditious” justice, and transparency and accountability on the part of the responsible authorities. Clearly, things have changed, in many cases improved, from the “hard-line” PRI era, but Mexico does not fully qualify as democratic by conventional international measures.
This picture suggests that Mexico has returned – or at least is moving in the direction of – a prehistoric, indeed pre-democratic, era of national political life. The president has not had the slightest scruple in employing all the resources at his disposal to secure his electoral objective. When a path was closed to him -for example, a call from INE (already biased) to refrain from being so crass in its forms- he invented twenty constitutional reforms (the “Plan C”) to be able to have a “legal” presence in the political and, therefore, electoral sphere, every day. He also did not have the slightest qualms in presenting himself as the head of the campaign of his candidate, whom he named, controlled, and obstructed throughout the process (which, in addition, raised all kinds of speculations about the relationship that would characterize the two political actors after the elections of June 2024).
President López Obrador’s legacy will be multifaceted. His economic strategy achieved its goal, but the extraordinary increase in the fiscal deficit by 2024 leaves a question mark over the stability and sustainability with which his successor will receive the fiscal accounts; his security strategy enjoys an almost unanimous level of disapproval; his electoral strategy was successful in achieving his goal of electing the successor of his choice, but at the cost of a severe deterioration of the political institutions, including the electoral ones, which were built over the past four decades.
Mythical leaders enjoy temporary advantages but almost always end up being ephemeral in the long term. The bills of a government that is poor in results -arrogant and, at the same time, modest in its objectives- will be paid sooner or later. Still, the calendar may not respect economic, political, or emotional times. The bills always arrive, and it will be there where the circumstances of the moment and the astuteness of the winner will determine the outcome and her capacity to govern. It is worse when the country the president leaves behind lacks solid institutions capable of conferring viability to the government and governance and without the characteristics and skills of the president himself.
Beyond the election itself, the political-structural legacy of the government will be much more transcendent and relevant than is apparent, but not necessarily in a benign way. Because of his history and characteristics, the outgoing president is unrepeatable, and the election winner will have to find her own way to face the challenges -hers and the country’s- that lie ahead. Like no one else in the whole post-revolutionary era, she will face the enormous challenge of building at least a minimum scaffolding to be able to govern, given that the previously existing structures -those conceived since Plutarco Elías Calles and those that were forged for a democratic era in the last decades- have been worn out and are already inoperative, if not counterproductive. Governing her own party -an entity without structures that only its founder could articulate- will be a major challenge, and that is if the outgoing president does not try to hinder it. The so-called country of institutions runs the risk of fragmenting under the shadow of caudillos, regional leaders, and organized crime, all of this in the middle of the 21st century with an economy that lives and functions exclusively thanks to a free trade agreement with our complex northern neighbor.
There is a saying, “To every little saint comes his little party.” The “fiestecita” that begins in 2024 entails exceptional opportunities but also enormous internal and external risks. The country has lived five years as if inside a bubble, connected to the rest of the world but pretending that it is independent and can isolate itself without major consequences. The new president will soon find that the viability of the main engine of growth of the Mexican economy is at risk and that the call to account for omissions and acts contrary to the letter and spirit of NAFTA will come sooner rather than later. At that moment, Mexicans will know what kind of president we have and her capacity to face these challenges.
In the British, but also the PRI sense, “the king is dead; long live the queen.” All citizens must tuck her in because she will require all the national support that, as citizens, we must trust, will be reciprocated with civility and without polarization.
*Alejandro Moreno’s figures in the aforementioned survey.
www.mexicoevalua.org
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a quick translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx