Luis Rubio
The government changed, but the problems remain, which does not mean that they can cease being attended to. Mexico has been experiencing a peculiar paradox for many years: an increasingly activist government with an increasingly weak State. Perhaps this is about a way of facing, or hiding, the true problem: the government increasingly controls less territory and its capacity of leading the country diminishes in parallel with the nearly uncontainable rise of the population’s expectations but, especially, of the ambitions of those who govern.
The problem is not new in Mexican political life, in that it goes back to the beginning of the country’s independent life in the XIX century: the great challenge was always that of pacifying the country and its integration as one, sole nation, especially after the American invasion of 1847. The time of the Porfirio Díaz government (1877-1911) was the first period during which the government achieved a consistent pace of economic growth, a circumstance that repeated itself with the PRI after the revolutionary feat. The contradictions of that system and its inevitable limitations eventually led to economic liberalization and to the political opening, respectively, with the consequence (clearly unanticipated) of debilitating the government and reopening the brutal struggle for power that, as in the XIX century, although with distinct specific characteristics, starts to seem like a new normality.
Since the nineties, when the first far-reaching political reforms were negotiated, those that would lead to undisputed democratic elections and to the development of several institutions that were critical for governance, the need was debated for an integral reform of the structure of the Mexican State. The objective soon lost its focus and the reforms were limited to the creation of some institutions and organisms oriented toward resolving specific problems that came to present themselves, such as energy, competition and elections.
What those projects and concrete reforms did not attend to, and what during those years came to light in all its dimensions in the Lopez Obrador government, was the problem of power. In a literal and conceptual sense, the objective of an institution is that of containing power, that is, hindering or limiting potential abuses by those political holding power. The point is not to hamper a president from exercising their functions and responsibilities, but instead for their acting in terms of adhering to the law and not to violate principles, so that it confers certainty on the population and protects the rights of the minorities. The idea of a counterweight is not to impede, but rather to render transparent: that the affairs be debated that correspond to the three branches of government and that there come forward those who support as well as those who object to a certain determined program or project, so that with that information, the legislature and the judiciary, respectively, can process their decisions.
To the degree that a president can act with no limitation whatsoever, the whole society lives in uncertainty. Of course, those who enjoy and benefit from the decisions assume that the latter are desirable and thus merit universal endorsement, while those who object to them and/or feel aggravated by them think the opposite. A civilized society knows that power changes hands over time and that implies that those found on one side of the equation could someday find themselves on the other; this is the reason why the existence of strong institutions liable to resisting the onslaughts of power, are beneficial to all and, thus, become a source of certainty for all. This that would seem so obvious and towards which Mexico was, more or less, advancing, was destroyed in just a few months.
The important point is that the entire population, independently of its socioeconomic reality, should have the means to be abreast of where it stands. The former government scored a milestone on raising the cash transfers to an enormous segment of the population, which, paradoxically but logically, provoked uncertainty with respect to the permanence of those programs during the electoral period. The institutionalization of those programs is thus key for the beneficiaries of those programs to be certain that those programs would not become a matter for electoral dispute.
Exactly the same is critical for the regulations that govern private investment in sectors that earlier were reserved for the government, such as electricity. The strength of institutions lies in the certainty that they confer on the population in all ambits of the society and the economy.
Where many of those who decades ago advocated for a reform of the State erred was in focusing on the creation of institutions in lieu of immersing themselves in the containment of power. Though it is evident that containing power is manifested through institutions, this containment is impossible without an integral reform of power and that is the great challenge of Mexico, much more so now that the government is experiencing the onslaught of her predecessor. The virtues of the new president are many, but they are very distinct from those of her predecessor and will surely not permit her to contain the tensions, conflicts and interests encountered (even within her own party) without her attending to that crucial problem: the excess of the concentration of power.
@lrubiof