Luis Rubio

The engine of political liberalization -and of the incipient Mexican democracy- was the succession of electoral reforms that, from the year 1964, but above all in 1996, was experienced by Mexican society. Each of those reforms responded to its own circumstances, but that of 1996 was crucial because it was the product of an open negotiation between the diverse forces and political parties, smoothing the way for transparent, fair and duly protected competition, in an institutional sense, for accession to power. In true  Mexican style, Mexicans took a great step forward and subsequently did not follow through.

During these decades the country underwent two contradictory processes. On the one hand, the economy was modernized and transformed, creating an exceptional platform of growth in some regions and sectors, but also a series of enormous backlogs and obstacles for the rest. On the other hand, in unison with competitive elections, politics withstood increasing degradation due to the on-going violence and insecurity, the impunity with which public and private actors conducted themselves without the slightest compunction, and with the corruption that corrodes all things. The bases were established for political competition and economic functionality, but the institutional structures were not built that would bestow permanence and viability on those two great achievements.

Democracy flourishes when society assumes itself as citizenry, capable of rendering their rights valid, which is only possible through solid, vital and functional institutions. Although various institutions were developed, two indicators reveal that the result is not commendable. On the one hand, the violence and insecurity demonstrate that an adequate security and justice system was not engendered to match the prevailing state of affairs. On the other hand, nothing better illustrates the deficit that the facility with which the current government has destroyed that entire scaffolding with which it was hoped that Mexico would accede to modernity and civilization.

Democracy is more than elections: it has to do with citizen rights, justice, freedom of expression, checks and balances for the exercise of power and the limits of potential abuse on the part of the rulers. In fact, in the words of the great XX century philosopher, Karl Popper, democracy consists of the certainty that those that rule will not abuse the citizens. And Popper speaks of countries with functional governments, of which Mexico is plainly not a good example.

In Mexico democracy stayed stuck in place on the first rung of the ladder. In 1997, in the first federal election after the 1996 reform, the opposition won the majority of the Congressional seats, followed by the victory of Fox in 2000. Two outstanding successes in a country that had been characterized by political stability but not due to citizen participation. However, nothing, except access to power, changed in Mexican politics. Truth be told, politics continued to deteriorate in parallel with the rise of organized crime, the absence of justice and the increasingly visible corruption. Now with AMLO attacking the National Electoral Institute (INE) it is not even evident that access to power through competition is guaranteed.

AMLO was a response of society to an unsustainable reality, but his strategy of returning to the centralization of power is a poor solution and in the last instance, futile, with regard to a fundamental problem: how is the country going to be governed. This is the main challenge with an eye cocked on the future but that is not the matter on which the public discussion is concentrated. The unique evident issue is that the control of a sole individual is not only unviable, but extraordinarily pernicious and dangerous.

The political forms and discourse changed, but not the reality.   Counterweights were claimed, but the presidents -each with the greatness or smalless of their vision and capacity- persisted in exercising power at will. They carried out ambitious reforms during the previous administration, but neglected to legitimize these through public dialogue, just as AMLO had done in his topics of priority. The point is that the country is not being governed and the climate of uncertainty is increasing and more and more risky, placing in doubt the economy’s viability and the functionality of the politics. Months away from the beginning of the formal process of presidential succession, it is less and less clear that the elections of 2024 will be clean and recognized.

The electoral processes barely comprise the first step in the edification of a successful and functional democracy, economically as well as politically. Mexico stayed stuck on that first step, and has now remained in limbo because of the contradictory electoral reforms being imposed in steam-roller fashion, not unlike those of the distant and nearby past. The grand question, with sights trained on the future, is how is Mexico going to emerge from the hole in which the government will have left the country.

The country is at present very divided, the government modifies practices that had been key for political stability and incurs ever more elevated risks in the political ambit, especially that of the succession. For those who blindly support the President, these are not relevant themes, but for those of us brooding about the building of a successful country, one less violent and with greater equity, there is no matter more transcendental.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

Perhaps the best paradox of Mexican politics today lies in that the main promoter of the opposition is the president himself, while it applies itself to wasting every opportunity it encounters. Lost in thought and in their own labyrinths, the political parties and their pathetic leaderships appear to lack the capacity to position themselves in the moment -and in the opportunity- in which the government as well as the citizenry have placed them.

The leaders of the opposition seem to ratify the saying of the great actor John Quinton: “Politicians are people who, when they see the light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” Those of the opposition are even more confused because they believe that they have nothing to lose, even when the president eagerly devotes himself each morning to setting out a silver platter in front of them. Much more transcendental is the pressure from the citizenry, a factor previously inexistent in Mexican politics, but today a potential opportunity.

Two months ago, this very citizenry went out to march in protest. Beyond the numbers of each march, the political fact is undeniable, so much so that the president dedicated entire weeks, before and after, to the matter of the citizenry coming out to march in defense of the National Electoral Institute (INE). There is nothing like an emboldened citizenry that finds a concrete and tangible cause to defend; much more so when the perceptions of the marchers clash in so frontal a manner with the everyday political rhetoric.

But the fact of the citizens’ march does not entail, in itself, political transcendence. Marches are citizen manifestations that make the participants bolder and pressure the authorities, but they do not translate, automatically, into votes, and even less so in such an inflexible electoral system that renders difficult (in fact, it entails a disincentive for) the birth or death of political parties. In a word, for a march to transcend it is indispensable for the existing political parties to activate and mobilize the expressions, fears, protests and aspirations of the citizenry and the civil society in general to convert them into political action and, at its time, into votes.

The march brought together a segment of the citizenry, made available a stronghold for the civil society and breached a big hole (especially in Mexico City) to the governing party and to the appearance of absolute control to which the president pretends, but it does not constitute a factor likely to gain political agency in the light of the 2024 elections. Even in the specific objective of the march -that is the INE- the citizenry was barely able of staving off Morena’s getting its way  in that and in other legislative affairs.

For that it is the political parties that hold all the cards and therein lies the great incognito of the electoral politics of the moment, and that is where the opposition lies. The opposition today, with the possible exception of the Movimiento Ciudadano, lingers as no more than a memory. Of course, in all political formations there are exceptional individuals with a surplus of abilities, but the parties themselves are virtual entelechies dominated by lugubrious leaderships without any ambition other than their own, already small, when not vile.

Such an inflexible electoral system allows for the perpetuation of the parties as well as of the leaderships, which incorporates an enormous degree of uncertainty concerning the capacity of those parties and leaderships to become vehicles susceptible of channeling the preferences of the citizenry.  In order to entertain the possibility of winning an election in 2024, the opposition will have to find not only an ideal candidate for that purpose, but also articulate a program that attracts the citizenry, stealing the control of the narrative from the president and creating conditions for all of the opposition parties to unite among themselves into the transformer force that the country requires, and that the citizenry demands.

The challenge is evidently huge, but there are three elements that will foreseeably assist in the process. The first is the president, whose bullheadedness will continue to alienate the citizenry, thus strengthening the   opportunities of the opposition, as it did with the march. The second is that Mexico is entering the period of succession, the most complex political process in any nation, in which the vulnerabilities, contradictions and insufficiencies of the government and of the political system in general exacerbate.  Along the way, all these factors are going to heighten and multiply precisely because of the nature of the president, of his party and of the level of conflict that both have imposed on the country. Finally, the third element will be the civil society’s entities, which today comprise the true source of organization, proposals, criticisms and studies that, de facto, have been putting in evidence the abuse of power.

What are lacking are opposition parties, at present lost in space and without exerting much influence but with all the elements to become the overwhelming might that the moment requires. On his deathbed, Voltaire said that “this is not the time to make new enemies.” The parties that today wander aimlessly along like the walking dead have in their hands the possibility, and the responsibility, to do the contrary.

That is, the opportunity is there.  The question is whether the opposition, pathetic today, could make it theirs.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The discussion in which the country should be engaging is what comes after this government. Some propose that by returning to before 2018 everything would be resolved; others propose a clean slate to start over.  Wherever one finds oneself between these extremes, in 2024 the country will find itself under the utmost of precarious conditions.

The first certainty is that there is nowhere to which to return. The majority of the citizenry voted to disapprove of what existed after giving an additional opportunity to the PAN (2006) and one more to the PRI (2012). AMLO won in 2018 because people were fed up with promises without satisfactory results for all. No one can doubt that during the past decades exceedingly favorable things were achieved that seemed impossible only some years before, but it would be equally absurd to fail to recognize that the results were not always benign and that in the interim, too many resentments had accumulated. To deny these basic circumstances would be to trigger yet another absurdity.

A second certainty is that the future does not pertain to anyone in particular, starting with the president and his acolytes. The future cannot be generated by a small group, however powerful, whatever its ideology or social position. Thus, the future belongs to the citizenry in its entirety. It is individual actions that, on their amalgamation, produce the society being built. The way is made by walking.

Finally, a third certainty is that the stability, functionality, growth and development of a society and its economy require stout moorings that create circumstances that satisfy at least two criteria: one is to protect the rights of the citizenry and its interests. That is, that engender institutional mechanisms of access and participation in decision making and that establish procedures that solve disputes through methods that are known and available to all, unlike the present methods that negate justice to the majority. In a word, all of society should feel itself to be an integral component of the social fabric, and not, as demonstrated by AMLO, a society divided, a good part of which is alienated from the advances and successes that have indeed been achieved by parts of the society and the economy. The other criterion is that the distribution mechanisms of wealth should be transparent, technically developed and subject to audit, so that the Treasury is not utilized for personal promotions nor for diverting public resources for the enrichment of those found (temporarily) in power.

Mexico’s problem is not “technical”, that is, it does not rest on having the best legislation for the this or the most adequate strategy for that. All those factors are obviously necessary, but also obtainable. The problems of Mexico do not arise from the lack of laws or lawyers and legislators capable of redacting and improving them; the same can be said for competent professionals to administer the public treasure, justice or the strategies of public policy that would be susceptible to redressing the problems or edifying new realities.

Throughout the last century, Mexicans have witnessed the presence of exceptionally endowed functionaries and visionaries in parallel with others who were embarrassing, incompetent and destructive.  The problem is not one of capacities, but instead of the absence of limits. Therefore, the challenge lies in the citizenry obligating the politicians to act within the earmarked institutional frameworks. And that is a political challenge, one of power.

Going back or changing is not the choice facing the Mexican citizenry. Its true dilemma lies in breaking the bonds imposed by a political structure that confers excessive power on a single individual, to the degree that his mere gift of gab can dismantle institutions, cancel highly transcendent (and costly) projects, or initiate economic as well as criminal processes against whomever they please. Four years into these misdoings have made it evident that the institutional constructions of the past decades were pure and simply a facade not (necessarily) because their authors thought so, but rather because they never understood, and thus did not calculate, the reality of the power that the presidency consolidates. Or, in benevolent terms, because they assumed that no one would come to wreak havoc on it all as their raison d’etre.

The issue is not new: it arose from the constitutional reforms undertaken in 1933, whose objective was to strengthen the presidency by eliminating the Supreme Court and the legislature as effective counterweights. Along the way, the “system,” which had conferred so many years of stability to the country, consequently turned into an impediment to the natural development of the citizenry, with all that implies: an educational system dedicated to control instead of to development; an economy with excessively dominant entities, beginning with those of the State; and a judiciary subordinate to the executive. In sum, a too powerful presidency with great capacity of positive action, but with a similar propensity toward destruction.

The coming challenge will be much greater than any that any Mexican currently alive has known.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

How times change! At this stage of the previous presidential term, the political discussion was concentrated on the weakness of the presidency after the end of the PRI era, when the debate was concerned about the excessive power of the presidency. Twenty years later those worries were focused on the feeble presidency. Without there having been a radical change in the legal or constitutional structures, today the debate is once again about the concentration of power. Now that the crucial year of candidate nomination begins, it is critical to elucidate what has changed.

The evidence is robust: change has not been of a structural nature but is instead one of individuals. Former president Peña Nieto practically retired from politics, leaving the (paltry) political task to be executed by his ministers or operators. The result was a government quite ineffective in governing, even while it affected weighty legislative changes.

On his part, López Obrador concentrates nearly exclusively on the political duty-at-hand, dedicating himself to narrating the events of the day in such a compelling manner that he dominates the domestic panorama. He complements that central assignment with frequent visits to the most remote spots in the country, where his entire activity and focus is concentrated on aggrandizing his popularity and securing power alliances. Nothing to do with governing.

The two governments evidence contrasts and similarities that are worthwhile highlighting. They are similar in their devotion to the past, but acutely different in their priorities. The contradiction at the interior of the Peña government was always flagrant: the old presidency cannot be recreated while headway it is advancing reforms whose essence is decentralization, as was the case of communications and energy. In the end the reformer part won, but the political work which so transcendental changes -in ideological and historical terms- demanded, failed. The easiness with which López Obrador has been veered the helm in the opposite direction is clear testimony to that.

The contradiction within the AMLO government is no less great, but it is of a different nature. The president has been markedly successful in dismantling many of the entities, institutions and mechanisms that characterized his predecessors, but the economic and social performance has been, to say the least, (nearly) catastrophic. For a government whose narrative exalts key issues such as poverty, corruption and inequality, his administration is wending its way as fast as it can toward substantially increasing all those indicators. The question today, at the beginning of the government’s penultimate year, is what will be the consequences of this way of managing (or lack thereof) and how distinct will the end be from that of his predecessor.

What is apparent is that the great difference between both administrations has been the person of the president: one reserved and the other hyperactive; the former committed to working in private, the latter foisting himself upon all the forums and excluding, disqualifying or intimidating everything he perceives as an obstacle to the consecration of his (al)mighty presidency.

Last October, President Xi Jinping achieved a milestone that might look similar in terms of consolidating himself as the most powerful leader in China in at least half a century; but the differences are notable: in China, the structure that the president developed, within a consolidated legal and political edifice, is imposing, which renders him so much more powerful and, potentially impregnable.

The case of Mexico is very distinct. The same context   produced a president in Peña Nieto who ended up being weak and the other, López-Obrador, whom, to date, has been extraordinarily strong. Given that the difference is one of individuals in the presidency and of their capacity to act, the question is, how will the next president -male or female- be. What seems obvious is that neither of the two models is repeatable: the first because no one would wish to consciously imitate it, and the second because the conditions that made it possible are unique, exclusive to the person and his history. Much more importantly, how many years can a country endure the systematic deterioration of its economy, security, public services and in the relations between the government and society? And without being governed?

President López Obrador has concentrated exclusively on his popularity and power. To attain this, he has procured the preservation of poverty, containing (or impeding) the growth of the economy, and has permitted insecurity to flourish. He might well had been following the script that, from the XVI century, was penned by Étienne de la Boétie: “It has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.”

Whosoever succeeds President López Obrador will not count on the elements that would allow them to recreate their predecessor. Rather, the new president would have to correct the course to confront the fiscal, political, economic and social problems, not to mention the international ones, which will comprise the legacy of the current administration.

The candidates who are decided on this year should be clear in this regard because the citizenry, currently overwhelmed by a fallacious narrative, but one that is highly effective, will clamor for accountability at the first light.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

People migrate for any number of reasons, and have done so for millennia: climate, the search for opportunities, fear, and insecurity. Sonia Shah* explains that the prototypical migrant tends to be the kind of people who don’t have big bank accounts or landholdings, but are rich in good health, skills, education and social connections with people in other places. Nobody doubts the contributions that migrants make to the societies in which they settle or the benefits to their communities of origin but, says Shah, the relevant question to ask as massive waves of migrants take shape is not why people migrate, for migration is a force of nature, rooted in human biology and history. “The relevant question to ask is what are we going to do about it.” This question is key as migration became a powerful force behind Trump’s victory and Brexit.

One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave

Michel de Montaigne, 1580

A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts, and most of us never dreamed of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term refugee has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees. Before the war broke out, we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove… that we were just ordinary immigrants.

Hanna Arendt, 1943

A stranger always has his homeland in his arms like an orphan for which he may be seeking nothing but a grave

Nelly Sachs, 1959

Migration isn’t a one-directional process; it’s a colossal process that has been happening in all directions for thousands of years

Moshin Hamid, 2017

I am not an Athenian or Greek but a citizen of the world

Socrates, c 420bc

Emigration is easy, but immigration is something else. To flee, yes; but to be accepted?

Victoria Wolff, 1943

Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul

Horace, c20bc

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn’t money; it’s a story

Suketu Mehta, 2019

Better free in a strange land than a slave at home

German proverb

All of man’s unhappiness stems from one thing, his inability to stay quietly in one room

Blaise Pascal, c 1660

Here everyone is equal. There are no poor, no rich. He spouts names like Columbus, Shakespeare, and Buckle and big words I don’t understand like civilization. He wants to write a song about them but has no ink, pen, or paper. My brother Elyahu tells me that if he doesn’t like this country, he can go back.

Sholem Aleichem, 1916

In 1937 the Dewey Commission conducted and investigation into the charges against Leon Trotsky made during Joseph Stalin’s Moscow show trials. “Of what country are you a citizen, Mr. Trotsky?” the commission asked. “I am deprived of my citizenship in the Soviet Union. I am not a citizen of any country,” Trotsky replied. “What, if anything, did you do when you were informed of the deprivation of your citizenship?” “I wrote an article about it,” he said. I am a man armed with a pen.”

Migration has been politicized before it has been analyzed

Paul Collier, 2015

In June 2021 the city of San Antonio inaugurated its North American Friendship Garden, a rest stop for migrating monarch butterflies featuring native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. The garden’s aim is “the friendship and goodwill of three countries working toward common goals,” one city official said. “As a migratory insect, the monarch is a representative of migration.”

Shrimps may dance, but they do not leave the river

Japanese proverb

In 1639 Puritan settlers in Massachusetts authorized the expulsion of “pauper aliens” in what is thought to be the first case of deportations in the country. Soon after, Virginia and Pennsylvania passed laws heavily restricting “the importation of paupers,” which included criminals and “foreigners and Iris servants.”

Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Emma Lazarus, 1883

According to an Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sent a group of Mexica on a journey to establish the new center of the world. After some two hundred years of wandering, they saw an eagle resting on a cactus with its “wings stretched outward like the rays of the sun.” Taking the bird to be a divine sign that they had reached their destination, they “began to weep and dance about with joy and contentment.”

Heaven and earth and all things change and transform into something new every day

Guo Xiang, c300

Human migration is unstoppable and, given the vast and growing differences between Southern and Northern nations, it is bound to keep growing. The big question is whether it can become orderly to serve and complement each other’s needs.

*The Next great Migration, Bloomsbury, 2020

Happy New Year!

www.mexicoevalua.org

@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) says that “the True University of these days is a collection of books.” Here is my best attempt to share some of the readings that have most impacted me this year.

Two emblematic dictators-Stalin and Hitler- were allies at the beginning of theSecond World War, each because of his own interests and reasons, only to later end up in a fight to the deathuntil the Soviet Union’s occupation of Berlin in 1945. Hitler started the war and is the figure that has received more attention in the historical literature, to the degree that    WWII has frequently been identified as “Hitler’s war.” Sean McMeekin[i]argues that this is an erroneous focus becauseit was Stalin who took advantage of the circumstances presented to himat every juncture until gaining incomparable strategic benefits.While it was the United States that achieved the unconditional defeat of Germany and Japan,this iconoclastic account concludes that the undisputed winner of the conflict was Stalin, who imposed a very much longer-lasting tyranny.

InThe Spectre of War”, Jonathan Haslam venturesthat the Russian Revolution of 1917 altered international relations forever and that those who continued to adhere to the previous frame of reference erred in all their decisions, some extraordinarily transcendental,beginning with that the new Soviet regime was as important in Hitler’s rise as the Treaty of Versailles. Yet more important, it led Western leaders to believe thatespecially for the British (Chamberlain), Hitler would be a key factor in containing Communism. No one can know what would have happened had the West and the Soviet Union become allies in the thirties in order to impede the growth of Germany, butHaslam’s speculation is key: “the lesson of theinterwar years is that in political lifethe extremecan tooeasily become the mainstream.”It is key, Haslamgoes on, not to ignore history,because “History does offer warnings, if we care to recognize them for what they are.”

Michael Nieberg wrote on the fall of France in 1940, a collapse that no one anticipated given the famous Maginot Linethat the French, and the rest of the world, thought invulnerable, only to find that Nazi Germany invaded France through The Netherlands, circumventing formidable fortifications. The book[ii]deals with the impact of the invasion of France on the U.S. and the approach transcends the immediate matter-at-hand. In essence, the argument is that the folding of France swayed theU.S. because our neighbor to the North had conceived of France as a wall of contention that would provide protection from any enemy on the Atlantic side; the fall would oblige it to rethink its entire conception of the world and, thence,to build the mightiest army inthe history of the planet that not only won that war, but that also became henceforth a world factotum. Of particular interest is the description that Nieberg portrays on howthe U.S. decided who would be their allyin France, wagering on Vichy, the government of the Occupied France, going against the British government that had carried out a conscientious   analysis of the French situation and concluding that the ideal partner would be de Gaulle. The book is itself fascinating, but it seems to me especially relevantbecause of the U.S. propensity for ignoring the local situation, thus blundering in the identification of its allies, as evidenced inVietnam, Afghanistanand Iraq.

Manuel Hinds wrote a book thatbreaks with the tendency of the last years on seeing in the government the solution to all the problems. In Defense of Liberal Democracy is a peculiar book in thatit is authored by a Salvadoran addressing the Americans. The central argument is that periods of technological change produce severe disruptions that, as now,  translate into income inequality and greater poverty, but that liberal democracy is the best instrument that humans have devised to confront these evils.  Hinds analyzes complex periods such as the French Revolution and Nazi Germany to conclude that the key to development and democracy lies in the consolidation of a horizontal society that he denominates “multidimensional,”which immediately creates checks and balances that strengthen  the capacity of the generation of ideas, projects and productive activity becausethese align the incentives of persons with those of the development of their country.

The best book that I have read on the China–U.S. relation was written by a former Australian prime minister, who describes the complexity of the interaction of these two societies, its historical misunderstandings and, especially the points of convergence and divergence.  Its title,“The Avoidable War”[iii], is suggestive: the route of suspicions and conspiracies that are assumed by both sides have a sole possible outcome, lest both parties recognize the need to come to key understandings for them and for the world.

Luis Rubio

The way that the current presidential term closes will be determinant for the potential future of Mexico. Given the enormous power and legitimacy that President López Obrador has accumulated during these years, the matter turns in good measure to a very simple dilemma:  Which will win: the narrative or the reality?

In a recent video that went viral, the political consultant Antonio Sola states that AMLO is a transitional president who decodes the national reality with which he will create the conditions for governments of the upcoming decades. His argument is essentially that AMLO owns the narrative because it is he who dominates the technique of telling stories that touch the emotions and that he can do this because he has no competition, in that the opposition plays the president’s game instead of building an alternative narrative. While not new, the argument is powerful because it could determine the evolution of this president’s term of office and, in consequence, the nature of the next.

The flip side of the coin is that not all of it is narrative. Piquing the emotions of the voters, that which politicians do, is central to the exercise of leadership in a nation, but it is no substitute for the government’s performance, especially in the economy and security, which at the end of the day is fundamental for each of the members of the society.

In so far as the reality walks in parallel to the narrative, that is to say, one complements the other, presidential leadership marshals strength.  Contrariwise, when the distance between both results unsustainable, one of the two culminates in imposing itself on the other, usually the reality… That is the tessitura that, from my point of view, will determine the next two years.

The way this government ends will be determinant of the capacity that the president retains in terms of nominating his preferred candidate and, not of scant import, avoiding the fracture of the Morena party.  To date, the president has been able to have the upper hand over the political panorama with his exceptional narrative skill, but his unwillingness to promote economic growth and his stubbornness in controlling everything, now including the electoral institutions and processes, has stagnated the country and provoked ever deeper divisions within society. In addition, the institutional destruction and concentration of power creates negative incentives for investment as the perception of risk rises. The result has been that, however marvelous the narrative, its distance from the day-to-day reality is growing.

In this context, there are two means of focusing on what is to come in 2024: one is the way in which the economy and security situation evolve during the subsequent two years, in that the latter will determine the distance between the narrative and the reality, as well as the strength of the president. On the other hand, independently of how the government ends, the liabilities that this administration will leave will be monumental, with dramatic repercussions that will be measured in terms not in years but in generations.

Even the believers in the presidential project will have to recognize that structural liabilities have been created that will not be easy to correct. Here are some of the obvious ones: first and foremost, the destruction of trust and of institutional sources of certainty. Part of this is due more to Trump than to López Obrador (for weakening NAFTA), but the aggregate effect is devastating, and it will require decades to build something liable to secure wellsprings of sustainable, not politicized, trust. The change in the structure of the governmental budget will reverberate with the lack of growth beyond this term because it will be exceedingly difficult to eliminate expenditure items that are politically and socially transcendent (especially cash transfers to the president’s clienteles), but that do not contribute to the general growth of the economy. Third, deriving from the latter, the same is true of expenditures that are today executed by the army and that, in addition to its being prone to corruption, does not contribute to the chief function of that public institution while diverting resources that are necessary for the promotion of economic development. Finally, the educational system, already a long-standing burden regarding development, especially in the digital era, will not only have not advanced, but it rather acquired a deeply ideological profile that could lead to generations of graduates with no possibility of being employed in the productive apparatus.

These four examples illustrate the nature of the current government that, past the scope of its dogmas and obsessions, has entertained, as its sole objective, power, not a better future. The narrative has served to amass that concentration of power, but it will not be benign at the moment of succession. Of course, this does not alter the immense challenge facing the opposition to convince the electorate of a better future to dethrone the, up to now successful, presidential standing.

In addition to economic stagnation, the structural deficits that the present government will leave behind    are incommensurable.   Therefore, it is rash to extrapolate into the future supposing that nothing will change: the Latin phrase ceteris paribus, that implies conditions remaining the same. For a society accustomed to a permanent transactional relationship with those in government -votes for benefits- no narrative will compensate for the lack of jobs, opportunities, security and, not inconceivable, another crisis.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The central characteristic of our time would seem to be the tensions that generate real or perceived inequalities in the distribution of the benefits of economic growth. Countless nations around the world have elected leaders whose calling card has been the rejection of whatever existed. Obvious examples include Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and now Lula and, in the same fashion, Chávez and López Obrador. The motion of the pendulum has been extreme in some nations, much more moderate in others, but the desire is unmistakable: to take refuge in a known past and to abandon the milk and honey of unfulfilled promises. The question circulating the globe is how distinct the future will be.

Seen in retrospect, it is very clear, and easy to arrive at the conclusion that the narratives accompanying the golden era of globalization along the last three decades resulted in being utopic, thus impossible to satisfy. In fact, one of the lessons furnished by one survey after another, in Mexico and worldwide, is that people are more unappeased by the sluggishness of the advance than by a longing to return to familiar ground. The great problem of globalization does not lie in the lack of results, but instead in the unequal distribution of these. The citizenry thus recognizes this:  what it yearns for is to be part of the success, not to boomerang back to an uncertain past and one of poverty.

On the other hand, the political attractiveness is evident of exploiting the sentiments and resentments that engender the disruptions giving rise to the accelerated change that the world has undergone during these years, nearly all this more the product of technological advances and changes than of the economy per se. The technological change has been the chief component of economic globalization and, above all, of the alteration of value chains.

The first component of globalization are the instantaneous communications that have transformed the economic, but not the social and political, reality. Today any person has access to more information than the governors knew only a few decades ago; the possibility of communicating and sharing information has radically revolutionized our daily lives in a more pronounced manner than any other factor in the history of humanity. Telephones sixty years ago were mechanical contraptions assembled by factory workers in simple production lines. Smartphones, veritable computers that they are, entertain enormous creative power and, relatively little manually incorporated material. The value relationships have been recast, explaining why very-high-quality education is so important.

Clearly, technology has made globalization possible while simultaneously underscoring social differences significantly, provoking the political, nationalistic and introspective reactions we experience every day. To this one must add the geopolitical competition depicting the world powers: certain nations have reinforced their industrial-policy strategies, while others, especially the U.S., have begun to adopt the latter in explicit form. Part of this responds to the unionized base (paradoxically) of Biden as well as of Trump, but much of this derives from its competition with China. Parenthetically, it is of import to annotate here that these changes in industrial matters constitute an immense opportunity for Mexico, but that is another affair.

About which there is no doubt is that there has been a profound alteration in the approach to perceiving economic processes.   Today politicians claim to determine the way economic matters are decided upon, and that constitutes the most prodigious change undergone in the world in decades. Some argue that the supply chains are too intricate for these to be modified, but the reality is that political pressures and incentives are eroding these at fast speed.

There are two things that seem apparent to me: first, technology will continue advancing and that will affect the economic course of action. The other is that many of those demonstrating the most against globalization are also those who will most suffer the losses of deglobalization. As with all pendula, novel tendencies sooner or later start to exhibit the limitations of the new policies and a new backwash will come. The world moves in cycles, and today’s is only another of these.

Borja Sémper sums up the dilemma clairvoyantly: “We are living through the first great backlash of the new world order arising from globalization, a world that is not static and that is characterized by constant change. A change that bewilders many. ‘Worldization’ is a reality charged with opportunities and challenges, it is a creator of wealth (the new capitalism requires adjustments, as have been needed in all changes of era, but it continues to be the system that has created and distributed the most freedom and wealth in the history of humanity), nonetheless still possessing the Achilles’ heel of the absence of governance that allows us to know and correct its overreach. The crisis is of confidence, and confidence is one of the basic pillars of democracy.”

The question for Mexico is the same one as always: Will it respond with a sense of future or try to control uncontrollable processes?

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

In “The Seventh Seal”, a 1957 film by Ingmar Bergman, a knight returns from the Crusades to find his homeland ravaged by the plague. Suffering and devastation had shaken his faith in God. When Death comes for him, the crusader proposes a game of chess to eke out enough time to commit an act—any act—that might bring meaning amid the pestilence.

Mexico has lived with a stink for years, which has left no one satisfied: neither those who benefitted nor those who felt infringed upon. The demand grew to furnish meaning and transcendence in view of that feeling of uneasiness, but also of the systematic growth of the middle class. The breeding ground was ready for a shakeup. The 2018 election represented a break with the restive years and, we now know, also with the advances that had been achieved.

There are at least three indisputable factors in what happened in those elections: first, the country had been undergoing for nearly three decades profound changes that had improved innumerable factors, but that had not resolved fundamental problems that had been dragging on, such as insecurity, corruption, poverty and inequality. Many indices have improved, but the quality of the governance, at all levels, has waned and no government at least since the eighties, when those reforms began, had the capacity or disposition to propose and advance integral solutions regarding these circumstances.  The improvement was notable, but also the lags, above all because they affected an enormous portion of the citizenry.

A second factor, the proverbial straw that broke the camel´s back, was the prodigious incompetence and corruption that characterized the administration of Peña Nieto. A president who won in 2012 due to his skill in communicating capacity of execution, he resulted absolutely ignorant about the circumstances in which the country lived, of the outcry for solutions and the eagerness for clear headed leadership. That president grasped the need to finalize the reforms that impeded the attainment of the objectives, at least in the economy, of the reformer project from the eighties on, but was incapable of getting the population behind them.  Paradoxically for a purely political president, his acting was absolutely technocratic, nearly sterile, in terms of how he advanced reforms of huge political transcendence, disrupting sacrosanct constitutional articles. In addition, envisioning himself in another era of history, he could not realize or acknowledge that the old political ways, and the corruption that accompanied them, were unsustainable in the era of social media.  It could almost be said that he conscientiously dedicated himself to setting the stage for his successor and, with his response to the Ayotzinapa murders (2014), to guarantee the triumph of López Obrador.

The third factor was the perennial candidate who had for two decades criticized the reformer project, fueling the resentment and providing a means of expression to all the unrest and despair that had been accumulating for centuries and that had been exacerbated by the reforms he denominated “neoliberal.” His discourse and his person had acquired moral authority on his expressing the turmoil that had overtaken many Mexicans.  After two defeats, he arrived at the presidency with the table set by his predecessor, who seemed to have mapped out his script expressly to match the call to arms of today’s president.

On being in the government, the president has proven to be a native PRIist. Very much in the style of his predecessors, he has devoted himself to reconstructing the old presidency, though with a bias not at all PRIist: his deep rejection of any institutional sense. The authority of the person of the president is sufficient to resolve the problems afflicting the country, all these the product of the lack of will of his forerunners. It is not necessary to fix the problems that he promised: attacking his adversaries will cover the record.  The results to date speak for themselves and are manifested in the brutal contrast between the president’s popularity and the rebuke typifying his government. The president retains his credibility as a person, but not due to the performance of his administration.

The mismatch is obvious, particularly among the middle classes, that is, the great achievement of the PRI era, which was not modified one bit during the two administrations of the PAN.   The objective of the postrevolutionary regime had consisted of development with stability, the latter based on a growing and increasingly affluent middle class. That middle class, disenchanted by the unequalness and corruption of the last decades, mutated toward López Obrador in 2018 in a virtual uprising.  It is paradoxical that an electorate worn out by so many unfulfilled promises would usher into power a president rabidly opposed to the very idea of consolidating the middle class. Disparate partners, unsustainable alliance.

Now that the end of this administration is approaching, everything is up for grabs. The coalition -formal and informal- that seconded the president in his election of 2018 is fragmented, as illustrated by the result of the referendum on the President back in April, when AMLO obtained half of the votes than in his original election. Absolute power demoralizes, wrote Lord Acton. Mexicans live this every day.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

 Luis Rubio

All societies face risks, but the risk that Mexico and Mexicans confront today is immeasurable, above all because it is self-inflicted.   Mexico and the U.S. are advancing in the direction of a potentially uncontainable train wreck that, with enormous ease, could lead to the cancellation of the principal engine of the country’s economy.

The scene is not at all difficult to visualize. On the Mexican side, the government is preparing itself for war with its sparce arsenal. With the knowledge that its stance contravenes the content and spirit of the existing trade agreement, the United States-Mexico–Canada Treaty (USMCA), which links the three nations economically, the president is absolutely unwilling to alter the electricity-related legislation that is the motive of the dispute. Consequently, in his logic, the only way out is to go to war: thus, the recent changes in the Ministry of the Economy.

On the American side, President Biden has tolerated one after another of the pranks that President López Obrador has pulled on him; the question is whether the midterm results modify this circumstance. Trade negotiations must be ratified by the U.S. Congress, while the Office of the Trade Representative, an entity created by the Congress, but which belongs to the Executive Branch, reports to both. This circumstance obliges it to act and confers great latitude with respect to the administration. In a word, the key decisions of following or not the constitution of a panel for resolving the controversy, while subject to political criteria, depends substantively on that entity and not solely on the president’s objectives. Additionally, the new political circumstances for President Biden, who came out better than expected from the midterms, could be defining for the bilateral relationship, given that it could determine whether President Biden will run for re-election. Incumbent upon that scenario, released from the burden of having to deal with multiple flanks, Biden could opt for no longer allowing the continuation of the abuses foisted on him by President López Obrador.

The Mexican Government appears to be blind to the transcendence of what is at play with its (pathetic) defense of an autarkic regimen in electric issues. When the new Minister of the Economy was formally appointed, the President stated that: “We are no more under the conditions of maintaining the same neoliberal policy that had the government sequestered. Imagine 36 years of dominion of neoliberal policy.” Just imagine! Thirty-six years of lower prices for consumers, greater economic and political freedoms, certainty regarding the availability of energy and better-quality and better-paid jobs.  Just imagine!

It is obvious that everything was not good during the last decades, but (nearly) everything that was good, in economic concerns at least, took place during those decades, thanks to the reforms undertaken and the Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. After decades of crises every six years, the country achieved many years of stability, sufficient international reserves to avoid recreating the years of crisis that preceded it, and a growing export sector that guarantees the country incomes, jobs, better salaries and foreign currency.

Placing at risk the instrument that has afforded the country these opportunities constitutes a senselessness that can only be understood from a dogmatic ideological posture, blind and perverse. USMCA is crucial for guaranteeing access of exports that, due to the indolence of one government after another (exacerbated by the current one) became the sole relevant engine of economic growth. Instead of worrying about opening spaces for investment in the domestic market and generating conditions for a better distribution of the benefits, the country remained limited in its potential for development to this unique instrument that enables Mexican economic activity. In addition to that, on undermining private investment in energy, the government shut off one of the sources of greatest growth potential that also is crucial for attracting investment in other sectors. From indolence Mexico passed to negligence and from there to an intensifying risk of instability.

The president is vexed by the technocrats, those who know the factors that make possible the development of the economy. But affairs of trade and investment are absolutely technical and require personnel trained and experienced. What lies in the balance is monumental: beyond the question of the current controversy and the likely panel to settle this controversy, disputes with  European and Asian nations with respect to the same issue regarding electricity loom in the horizon; then come the lawsuits of the private companies, whose criterion is not that of obtaining compensation for their investment, but rather for the cash flows that they are (or would be) no longer receiving. That is, the matter in financial terms could easily end up as an exorbitant amount. Unless the president wishes to become a universal pariah (e.g. The IADB), with what that would imply in terms of incomes for the population, the issue merits care and a very different approach from than the one he is assigning to it.

It is natural for a politician to consider that all conflicts can be settled on those terms, but not on these issues, which are technical and call for less dogma. The government is playing with fire without realizing that fire burns.  Everything to it seems simple and hand-in-glove with an easily executed political solution. This time certainly not.

@lrubiof

a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx