Luis Rubio

The system of separation of powers devised by Montesquieu had as its main purpose the protection of the freedoms and rights of the citizenry. The idea was that the three branches of government would strike a balance that would make abuse by any of the three impossible: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Unfortunately, Mexico’s experience has not validated this notion concocted by the eighteenth-century philosopher. Instead of being the guarantors of freedoms and rights, a minority of ministers of the Supreme Court of Justice have managed to make a mockery of the essence of democracy and civility in the country.

The PRI era was characterized by the submission to the executive of the entire structure of power, both formal and informal, in the country. The hope was that the alternation of political parties in the presidency would produce a new equilibrium, for which various institutions were built, all of them conceived to prevent the abuses that, historically, the executive had extracted from the citizenry and imposed upon the entire structure of power. The first entity to be reformed was precisely the Supreme Court (1994), which was followed by the Federal Electoral Institute (1996), and then by a variety of institutions and entities dedicated to conferring predictability, certainty and stability on the conduct of the key affairs of national life, in all its ambits.

It is evident that that vision did not materialize for the entire country. Rather, after the financial crisis of 1995 and its sociopolitical consequences, the intended expansion of the “modern Mexico” towards the rest of society was abandoned, with which the country was split in two: the country of formality, exports and growing productivity; and the country of informality and extortion. The first generates growth, employment and opportunities, but in the second inhabits the majority of the population. The abandonment of this other Mexico has been patent.

López Obrador arrived to subvert the vision of the modern Mexico but, apart from entrenching himself in his idealized little world of the 1970s, he did not bring about a positive proposal for the construction of a better future. Instead, he has dedicated himself to dismantling the structures of modern Mexico, the one that functioned more or less well. With this, he is condemning the entire country to decline. To the promoters of the presidential vision, the proposals to subordinate the Supreme Court, dismantle the Federal Electoral Institute or terminate the process of energy diversification may seem visionary, but none of this is accompanied by a proactive plan, capable of giving viability or greater equity to the future. All that is being done is to return to an impossible past which, in any case, was neither attractive nor equitable.

Seen from this perspective, it is clear that the Supreme Court of Justice has not lived up to its fundamental responsibility, which is to protect the essential freedoms and rights of citizens. The Court has not only failed to attend to matters of primary importance for democracy and the integrity of the population -for which perhaps there is no better example than the so-called preventive detention without the intervention of a judge- but its performance has been extremely poor on key issues, as illustrated by the lopsided approach it took to the constitutionality of the electricity law.

In truth, the problem is not “The Court” but the strange requirement that characterizes its procedures, which mandate a two-thirds majority to determine the constitutionality of a law. This is what has given excessive power to the president and to the minority of four ministers the ability to trump the majority in transcendental decisions. In addition, the powers in the hands of the Court’s president to manage the paper flow allows him to determine which issues are dealt with and which are frozen, which favors special interests instead of advancing those of the general public.

The net result is that the Court fails in its key function of defending the citizenry. Rather, it is dedicated to protecting the government from the citizenry. One must wonder, how is it possible that the branch of government that is responsible for ensuring that neither of the other two branches abuse or limit the freedoms and rights of the population has ended up submitting itself to the executive and is dedicated to protecting the latter? In a word: who defends the citizenry?

What is evident in the behavior of several of the Court’s ministers is that their criteria are more political than legal. Although politics is, naturally, part of the context in which the members of the Court act, citizens must expect autonomy and independence in the workings of the Court, which is the only reason why their appointments are for fifteen years: to be sheltered from presidential influence.

In the world of reality, what is crucial is not the theoretical vision of a philosopher from two hundred years ago, but the elements available to citizens to protect themselves. The Court is or, rather, should be, the guarantor of these rights, so the pertinent question is when will the ministers assume their responsibility to protect citizens against abuses by the executive branch. That is to say: who do the ministers work for? Why insist on advancing an agenda that clearly contradicts the constitution and the freedoms and rights of the people?

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Luis Rubio

The agricultural worker at the end of the XVIII century was suddenly displaced by the appearance of the steam engine that substituted for, says Gertrude Himmelfarb,* an average of 50 employees in one fell swoop. It took between twenty and thirty years before the nascent manufacturing industry would absorb that shifted manpower, this despite that the new technology, although terribly disruptive, was very easy to learn. Two hundred years later the world is undergoing a similar situation, but one accompanied by the enormous difference that the new technology -digital and informatic networks- is not easy to assimilate because it demands abilities and capacities that only an adequate educative system can provide.

The maladjustment derives from the technological change that affects all nooks and crannies of life: the economy, society and politics. No space has not gone unturned in an incisive transformation due to changes in the manner of production, instantaneous communications, the social networks and the interconnections linking communities worldwide. The manner of working has been transformed and there is no human might that can stop technologies such as the three-dimensional printers producing entire houses in the site at which they will be anchored or the contrasts in the value of traditional labor force -manual processes- in the face of those who devote themselves to programming the software making the computers function that control more and more productive systems.

The disruption is universal, but there are nations that find themselves in especially propitious conditions for confronting it, while the majority bear up under complex political processes to endure the consequences of the disruption.  Some use the public expenditure to stimulate economic activity, others generate anomalies. For AMLO the easy way out has been to try to take refuge in the former era in which the technological change was not a relevant factor, but the reality has demonstrated that this is not the solution. The antique sugar mill he portrayed months ago as the way out abides in history and only in confronting the digital era will the country get ahead. But what is evident is not always politically conducive.

All of this gives rise to a sea of uncertainty in all ambits, produces drastic changes in the philosophies of government and permanent anxiety with respect to the future.  The common denominator is the abruptness of the technological disruption and its cultural impacts, but every society seeks its own ways of coping with it. It is not by chance that nations that have invested massively in education in the past decades, especially the Asian nations, dominate many of the new technologies and exhibit an extraordinary capacity of adaptation. Contrariwise, societies that have not made these investments undergo diverse types of lurches and convulsions, as illustrated by cases such as that of Trump, Bolsonaro (Brazil), Castillo (Peru), Boric (Chile), Orban (Hungary) and Xi (China). The circumstances of each nation are distinct, what they are identical in is the urgency of coming to grips with the massive challenge that this disruption entails.

Needless to say, not all nations are devoted to what is important and urgent, which is to build the capacity to face this phenomenon head-on. As brought home by previous examples, many are found in denial, attempting to take asylum in an idyllic past or believing that they can erect barriers to impede being swept away by the approaching torrents. The notion that the reality of the knowledge world can be evaded is absurd, but that does not restrain many from dedicating themselves to this, including to be sure Mexico’s president.

The reality is that we have two options: one is to pretend that it is possible not to adjust oneself, which would imply a conscious decision to impoverish the country and close off all opportunity for the future, which is precisely what the current administration is doing. Following that course would require increasingly more controls, more repression and, consequently, fewer opportunities. They can gild the pill with all the dogmas and discourses imaginable, but none of that changes the inevitable trends and their consequences.

The alternative would consist of facing the future in decided fashion, which would involve carrying out all the changes that the country has refused to undertake in matters of education, health, infrastructure and, in general, changes the express construction of a future compatible with the forces that characterize the existing world. Manuel Hinds, a Salvadoran who has applied himself to thinking** about this, proposes the concept of the “multidimensional society” as a vision of facilitating the process of change and adjustment. His idea rings very clear: unidimensional societies have always been pyramidal in nature and incompatible with the digital technologies, the reason why it is imperative to accelerate the development of human capital (education and health),   to strengthen institutions likely to become effective counterweights and to separate the universe of the economy with respect to that of political power in order for each to fulfill their responsibilities and, together, build up economic activity and political stability.

Social networks or a pyramidal society: that is the quandary. On the latter depend development and democracy:  the dilemma is not a lesser one.

*The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age; **In Defense of Liberal Democracy

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Luis Rubio

The similarity between debates on the future is surprising in the United States and in Mexico. Very distinct societies, they are confronting situations that are not entirely different, but their circumstances are indeed radically so, which permits contrasts and learnings that have no equal.

In the U.S., January 6, 2021, changed the political panorama drastically: a key date every four years, it is the day that the U.S. Congress certifies the presidential election. For the first time in history, a group of demonstrators, egged on by Trump, invaded Congress, attempting to overturn the legislative proceedings. For the Democrats this comprised an insurrection while for the Republicans it was nothing more than a disturbance. In the end, that same night, Biden was certified, but most Republicans consider the election to have been stolen.

The dispute is centered on two elements. First, the election itself; and, two, the fact of placing in doubt time-worn constitutional procedures. With respect to the election, U.S. Federalism extends from the bottom up: it was the states that created the Federation, which is why they made arrangements for the conferral of equal representation of the states through the Senate, independently of their population. This arrangement made possible the Constitutional “Great Compromise,” which entails important implications that today are an essential part of the dispute: first, because states with fewer than one million inhabitants such as Wyoming, are entitled to the same representation as New York or California, each with tens of millions of inhabitants. This is what has created, on at least three occasions in recent decades, that a candidate who won the presidency did not win the popular vote. Also, given that each of the fifty states has its own electoral legislation and its respective authorities, its criteria for organizing and managing elections differs from the rest.

The electoral matter is central to the ongoing dispute and stands in direct contrast with the reality in Mexico; above all, it illustrates how absurd -or Machiavellian- the position of the Mexican President is. One of the most heated points of debate in the US focuses of the dispute on electoral matters concerning the requirements that a voter should fulfill to be able to cast a vote. The Republicans want strict requirements, for which the Democrats accuse them of wanting to restrict the vote. On their part, the Democrats wish to facilitate voting without restrictions. It sounds logical, until one observes the content of their proposals: there is not the least doubt that the Republicans have their eye on specific states and particular voters (above all, they charge that undocumented residents participate in voting, altering the result), but their proposals, though doubtlessly restrictive, are minor affairs compared with the Mexican electoral system. For example, the Republicans demand that voters present an official identification. The Democrats want to expand alternative means of voting, such as voting by mail and Internet, and they are opposed to any requisite involving the presentation of and ID.

The most visible (and effective) factor of Mexico’s electoral system -the voter ID- is rejected by the Democrats as a matter of principle. Both parties want to win the governorships that will hold elections toward the end of this year because that will afford them the opportunity to modify districting in their favor (another dramatic contrast with Mexico, where the institution responsible for districting is independent and autonomous).   The differences in the modes of managing the electoral processes lend themselves to the type of controversies that lie behind these examples, but their political implications are enormous and the heart of the second point of controversy.

The language says a lot: what for some is a disturbance, for others is an insurrection. The Republicans say that the Democrats want to close the door to a possible second Trump presidency (which is obvious), while wanting to ensure control of all the legal, administrative and electoral mechanisms for this to happen. The answer to all this lies in the midterm elections slated to take place in November of this year and that will determine the composition of the two legislative chambers and the thirty-six governorships at stake, in addition to that of the local legislatures. Typically, the party of the president loses the midterms, but this year that party could lose both chambers and, if it doesn’t lose them, the Republicans will claim election fraud with all their might. What’s up for grabs for 2024 is, well, incommensurable.

These circumstances have given rise to the publication of books* and articles asserting that the country is at the point of succumbing to a Trumpian dictatorship, not an inconceivable scenario, but a realistic one?

Indubitably, both parties have exacerbated the polarization, each blaming the other. It is also not impossible that another Trump government would degrade American democracy even more so due to the sole fact of its not respecting the institutions.  Although one must recall that, while he did defame them, he had no choice than to adhere to the rules, a huge difference with Mexico.

Mexicans face precisely the reverse: they have a great electoral institution that is under attack but an excessively powerful president who does whatever he wants without encountering any limit, except, until today, what the National Electoral Institute (INE) represents and, at times, the Supreme Court. The risks are very different, if citizens keep on allowing this.

*the most prominent being Barbara Walters, How Civil Wars Start

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 Luis Rubio

Scarcely two years into the Peña Nieto government the political ambience had been upended and, in retrospect, the electorate had already decided the outcome of the 2018 presidential election. All that today’s president and his retinue had to do was refrain from engaging in any lunacy. However much the diverse Morena-party contingents tried, López Obrador maintained internal discipline, dispatched positive messages to all the power groups and achieved his purpose. So much so that the electorate granted him virtual control of the entire State apparatus, including the other branches of government.

Now the tables are turned. The political milieu begins to feel hostile for many Morena adherents, starting with themselves, and evidence of corruption is catching up with the presidential family. The opposition acquired a high degree of self-discipline in the mid-term election and prevailed to a greater extent than the pollsters expected. Heretofore, there are two factors that will determine the future: one will be the capacity of the President himself to sustain control of his apparatus, as well as his popularity. The other factor concerns the opposition, its ability to nurture a viable alliance and, eventually, to nominate a candidate, male or female, liable to win over the popular vote. Although both sides feel confident, neither will have it easy.

On the President’s corner, the waning of his ability to control events is evident, something inevitable given the moment of the political cycle in which he finds himself. Above and beyond their own circumstances and skills, (nearly) all presidents and leaders worldwide sense being destined to change the world, despite the convincing historical evidence against this. Once in power they perceive themselves as omnipotent and consider they wield divine right to change everything, to the extent that the institutions permit this. Recent years have revealed the enormous contrasts between strongly institutionalized societies and those only claiming to be: there’s Trump, who fought tooth and nail, accomplishing little change, at least in institutional terms, while Erdogan in Turkey and López Obrador in Mexico addressed themselves to undermining the existing order without building a sustainable and sound alternative.

On its part, all that the opposition had to do was understand how the lay of the land had changed and organize itself to deal with the new political reality. Notwithstanding this, as Oscar Wilde wrote, its leaders “could resist anything except but temptation” on believing themselves to be all-powerful, as in the old times. Instead of dedicating themselves to the construction of a functional alliance, according to the conditions created by an overpowering governing party and after a successful showing in 2021, they committed themselves to preserving petty fiefdoms that are not central to their own objectives nor much less to the possibility, seemingly small at this moment in time, of winning the 2024 election. As the old Anglo-Saxon witticism goes, their three main priorities should be a common candidacy, a common candidacy and a common candidacy. A candidacy that can carry the day.

The concentration of power in Mexico is so great and tempting -whether they are presidents or political leaders- that they easily lose their footing: soon they come to perceive themselves as almighty. Although those found at the zenith of power -wheresoever they align on that pyramid- never have the adeptness to see it, time erodes the mainstays of that power and reduces their capacity of control. In the last analysis, it is enough to observe the fate of most Mexican ex-presidents to recognize that there is nothing more futile, nothing more ephemeral, than presidential power. The institutional weakness that characterizes Mexico has its counterpart in the political reality of those who leave power: they had everything and then they lose everything.

Presidents and opposition leaders, each in their stead, want the same: impose themselves, do as they please, exercise their power -whether little or much- as if there were no tomorrow. In the summer of 1812 Napoleon commandeered an army of more than one million men headed for the gates of Moscow. Three years later he was wasting his life away on the island of Elba. The same happened to the Egyptian pharaohs, to Hitler and to Mao. No one can save themselves from the twilight of power and, still worse, in a society as institutionally fragile as Mexico’s.

The greatness of power is not found in symbols, appearances or popularity but rather in the results of its exercise. As the saying goes, the most difficult year of the Mexican presidency is the seventh (of a six year term) because this is when reality gets underway. It is at that instant that the president recently leaving office makes a start at viewing the world as it is and not how he had imagined it to be.

For the opposition, the opportunity is real, but equally ephemeral. An alliance of the size and robustness necessary to defeat a party in good measure hegemonic is not built in a day nor can it be limited to a sole election. It is carefully sculpted into shape or is in the end impossible.

Both sides face a great challenge. Those on the outside should be able to recognize that their smallness can only be surmounted by an effective union, transitory or not, in terms of the transcendental objective such as that offered by the upcoming mother of all battles, that of 2024.

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Luis Rubio

The paramount question for the future of Mexico is how to create a foundation for its development in the long term. This concerns the eternal dilemma that is the object of distinct proposals and responses every six years but that never pans out. The most ambitious project for attaining this coveted transformation was NAFTA, which achieved three vital things: first, it resolved the chronic balance-of-payments crisis; second, it sowed the seeds of a platform of clear rules and mechanisms for making them be complied with, which became a source of trust and certainty for entrepreneurs and investors; and third, it allowed for the construction and development of a modern industrial plant capable of competing with the best in the world. None of this is trifling, but undeniably not enough.

The enormous success inherent in NAFTA did not extend to the country as a whole. In a text that appeared recently in the periodical Nexos, Claudio Lomnitz argues that the end product was a Mexico of rules and a Mexico dominated by extortion because in the latter a reform of justice and security was not brought about that would permit breaking with the factors that have historically anchored the country in underdevelopment.  And, worse yet, that the advance of organized crime has culminated with Mexico foundering in a sea of violence, uncertainty and decay. The present government, in its eagerness to procure votes and popularity without dedicating even a minute to matters of development or security, has exacerbated things not only due to ignoring them, but also to rendering them permanent.

Current scandals such as that of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic, the true objectives of so-called “preventive custody,” and the conflicts of interest with which some of the country’s large companies are led, on the outer edge of all regulation or legality, allow for catching a glimpse of the real problem confronting the country, the one which the next administration will have to attend to if it harbors the least minimal probability of starting to revert what seems to many today as the road to a failed State. A failed State, one in which vast zones of the country are inaccessible to any formal authority, subjects the population to a regime of submission to the narco-traffickers, the interminable wake of murders of journalists a case-in-point.

In 1982 Mexico found itself at a zero hour of dramatic proportions. The economy contracted in extraordinary fashion, unemployment grew as never before and the government discovered itself in virtual bankruptcy. It took ten long years to turn the situation around and it was NAFTA that enabled attracting the investment that would revert the crisis definitively. The question at present, in the face of a scenario similar in concept, though markedly distinct in specific characteristics, is that this would require turning the country around again, but this time with an inclusive outcome, one that tackles the problematic affecting the fact that the other Mexico that now lives in absolute insecurity, lack of definition and that it is perennially subject to extortion, of one ilk or another.

In contrast with the eighties, during which the Americans were more than willing to collaborate with the building of a new solution project -NAFTA- this time the task would have to be internal, the product of the erection of a political and social lattice that sanctions, once and for all, the shaping of this pummeled democracy with a penchant for failure. A project of this nature would imply rebuilding what could be denominated the “social compact,” which would in turn entail eminently precise redefinitions of responsibilities and relations between government and society, as well as the edification of mechanisms for making rules for compliance with the rules emanating from these.

The key point is that only an integral justice and security reform would countenance the achievement of such an objective. The reforms and/or strategies carried out over the last decades have been insufficient and inadequate for accomplishing this. For example, instead of beginning with the construction of a basis of security from the municipal level, the government opted for deploying the Army to pacify the country, with the result that a police force or justice system was never developed that would attend to the quotidian problems of the average citizen, while the best that can be said about what was done is that it evaded the further growth of organized crime. And to top it off, even this, with all of its limitations, disappeared with the consistent anti-strategy of doing nothing and trusting that things would solve themselves of the present administration.

Security and justice are the two great deficits that stand in the way of the country and that are perhaps the ticket to development and the future, supposing that their focus were to comprise a vision of problem-solving, building stability and security platforms from the bottom up, the only way to lay the foundations of something permanent. Mexican society clamors for security and justice, goals that have been rebuffed by one government after the other.

The famous Chinese ideogram alleges that crises are also wellsprings of opportunity. Mexico is moving directly toward a political, economic and social crisis.  Years of lethargy and, now, polarization, have engendered a collective blindness on the sole issue that is important: security and justice as the essence of integral development. High time to advance in that direction.

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Luis Rubio

Angela Merkel launched into her speech as would any president or head of state: with aplomb and clarity of message; but what followed was in no manner like typical presidential discourses. It was at an international congress in Berlin ten years ago; the governing party, the Christian Democrats, had loaned their headquarters for the realization of the event and the Chancellor was the speaker on one of the afternoons. After her speech was over the questions began and she avoided not even one: with absolute equanimity she went segued from one to the other; when the tone or complexity of the questions escalated, she responded with intensity. Parliamentary systems are very different from presidential ones, the latter protecting heads of state. Not so with parliamentary systems, where political leaders take on all issues daily, they confront questionings -reasonable as well as visceral- which obligates them to defend their cause and debunk their opposite numbers. For parliamentary leaders, there is no place to hide.

I remembered that scene when I saw President López Obrador speak about his “political testament” several weeks back. The contrast was stunning between a combative chancellor, ready to respond -and listen to- all refutations, and a president in an absolutely controlled atmosphere where nothing is left to chance. Parliamentary and political systems are very distinct one from the other, and each has its virtues and defects, but where parliamentary systems are exceptional is in the inability of the political leader to control the scenario. There we have Boris Johnson trying to save his skin on facing a rebellion of his own party or the permanent debility of the most recent Spanish governments because any movement could lead the opposition to the government.

Control of the scenario is precisely what characterizes the government of President López Obrador and the secret of his popularity. Nothing is left to fate: the narrative is home-brewed, the seat of the early-morning press conferences is that of the president, and the members of the press present, with eventual exceptions, are nearly always paid shills. Nothing is left to chance. If to that is added the absence of a united opposition with a narrative rivaling the presidential one, the scenario explains not only the control of the political discourse, but in good measure the popularity. As well as the risks that the very actor produces.

When AMLO invented the morning press conferences, at the beginning of his term as head of the Federal District government (2000), the context was decidedly distinct, reminiscent of the contrast between a prime minister and a president. At that time, AMLO was the pugilist who debated everything and responded to any questioning presented to him, while Fox was the protected president, isolated, tired and disinterested in defending a political project or even democracy itself.

Today’s AMLO, although obviously very dissimilar in personality and mode of acting, is like the Fox of back then, controlling his territory to protect his popularity. The relevant question is whether the finale of both protagonists will be very different.

Fox took office having achieved the historical milestone of defeating the hegemonic party. There was no way of outdoing that feat as president. If to that one further adds that he never understood the forces, hopes and changes that his electoral triumph had unleashed, the atmosphere would seem to guarantee a shipwreck. The combination of these two elements was lethal. On the one hand, his victory led to the “divorce” between the PRI and the presidency, which dramatically altered the structure of the traditional political system. The all-powerful presidency stopped being that (in addition to its diminishing by the very limitations of the personage), while all sorts of “de facto powers” acquired singular relevance, starting with the narcotraffickers. On the other hand, the overthrow of a party devoted to the control and submission of the citizenry had opened huge expectations for a democratic transformation. Fox demonstrated a lack of capacity to comprehend both dynamics. As so he fared.

López Obrador came on the scene with the mission of transforming the country from stem to stern: imposing a new system of government (well, the old system) and controlling the economy, the population and all the decisions. He rolled out lavish and historically overshot projects and remarkably soon ended up committed to the only thing that has come out right for him: his popular recognition. In contrast with Fox, who at least saw that no government or president can control everything in this era of the world, López Obrador tried to turn back the hands of time, only managing to freeze investment, in turn reducing the growth of the economy and the population’s employment opportunities and incomes. The pandemic, and Ukraine, became a good excuse for him in the light of a dismal administration, but migration to the United States informs against this, showing that there was indeed another way of governing and that the responsibility for the ongoing Mexican stagnation is exclusively his.

Will AMLO play out like Fox? The only thing for sure is that popularity is always fleeting, as illustrated by Fox himself and other presidents who preceded him. Dedicating oneself to popularity rather than to development entertains only one possible ending. The question is how bad.

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Wilson Center
  Luis Rubio   March 16, 2022

A referendum is supposed to be about initiatives undertaken by citizens or organizations of society to advance their agendas and garner support from the voters at large. In Mexico, the proposed referendum for next April (a new means of direct democracy that was only approved in 2019 by presidential prodding) was promoted by the president and has much more specific –and largely pernicious– objectives: it is meant to advance his own personal interests and agenda.

The proposed referendum was conceived by the president as part of his objective to dominate and control the country’s politics and agenda and to legitimize his government. In its original version, the idea was to establish a new foundation for the president’s party to remain in power for the long haul, much like the PRI did in its time. As things stand today, it has become not more than a means to enhance the president’s gradually waning popularity.

The law establishes that, for it to be binding, a referendum requires the participation of 40% of registered voters – an impossible feat. The previous similar exercise back in 2021, about whether to prosecute former presidents, attracted less than 7% of voters. Nobody expects much more than that this time around. Regardless, the president’s immediate objective is far simpler: to be able to claim that 95% of those attending voted for him. But there’s more to it than this.

Nothing better illustrates the imbroglio that national politics is presently undergoing than a December 2021 Alarcón comic strip on the so-called “revocation of the mandate” of the president: “We don’t want him to go, but we want to be asked whether we want him to go to say that we don’t want him to go.” The objectives of the president in promoting the referendum are transparent, but that does not make the process devoid of deception. The original thrust was to give citizens the possibility to vote for the president to resign; the actual wording that citizens will vote on reaffirms the president’s tenure, making impeachment impossible.

There are two independent dynamics advancing around this alleged citizen feast. One is the strategy being advanced by the president’s allies to convince as many voters as possible to show up on election day. The other one is taking place within the cohort that supports the president. In its attempt to increase popular participation on referendum day, the former promotes the illusion that the referendum makes it possible to force the president to resign. The latter aims to make certain that the beneficiaries of the president’s largesse (monthly cash transfers to his base) show up to vote. The ultimate objective is to raise the threshold of voting as much as possible.

Back in 2018, Lopez Obrador won the election with 53% of the vote. After that, his popularity reached 67%, but has since declined to 54% because of the exposure of several cases of potential corruption by the president’s brothers and son. As a result, the referendum has recently become much more than a tool to re-legitimize his rule: it has become his survival strategy. Today, nothing is more important to him than the referendum; for the president, everything hinges on the result.

Nobody, starting with the president, expects the referendum to change the status quo. His true aim is to gain an edge in the polls and to exploit his (alleged) victory to reload his popularity. Regardless of the actual outcome, the president will celebrate that the majority of voters approved of his presidency. He will repeat this over and over, even while most citizens, starting with those that refuse to participate in what many see as a charade, will have stayed out. Should the outcome be truly extraordinary in the number of participants, he may launch a frontal assault against the National Electoral Institute (INE) to reestablish executive control of elections, like in the old PRI times. As Stalin is supposed to have said, what matters is not who votes, but who will count the ballots. Retaining power beyond the current presidential term is the critical agenda of the president’s hardline advisors and supporters and the referendum is a key means to accomplish that.

Beyond the narrative and its daily expression in the form of a press conference, the president is experiencing the avatars of declining control, an inevitable trait of all governments as they advance through the second half of their administration. The real question heretofore is how negative the slope will be. The steeper the decline, the more likely Mexicans will experience a true competition for presidential succession; alternatively, if the government succeeds in maintaining a semblance of stability and order, the easier for him to nominate a successor and control the outcome. A truly fluid process.

Were the referendum to turn into an actual exercise in citizen participation, the competition would become far more vivid. So far, it has been Morena and its organizations that have been promoting the vote. However, many other organizations, most of them opposed to the president’s policies, have become quite active in attempting to convince them that a presidential defeat is actually possible. Hence, the competition will surely linger.

For an avowed student of history, President Lopez Obrador never understood Napoleon’s maxim that “to get power you need to display absolute pettiness. To exercise power, you need to show true greatness.” Reaching out to those who did not vote for him has not been part of his equation. Thus, the referendum is a perfect example of his persistent pettiness, for his objective has nothing to do with building citizenry, leading a true transformation of the country’s politics or improving the peoples’ livelihood, but with his unflinching desire to increase his power and impose himself on the half or Mexicans that do not follow him blindly.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/mis-referendum

LUIS RUBIO Global Fellow; Mexico Institute Advisory Board Member; Chairman, México Evalúa; Former President, Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI); Chairman, Center for Research for Development (CIDAC), Mexico

Luis Rubio

Mexicans longed for -such was the spirit of the moment thirty years ago and again in 2018- a successful country, developed, more equal and without the corruption that corrodes everything. But they were never willing to do what was necessary to achieve those aspirations. The result was to be expected: many promises, great expectations, followed by enormous disillusionments and their consequent political impacts.

Reform or transform, the two verbs employed to promote changes in the structure of the economy, the society, and Mexican politics during the last decades, mean the same thing:  modify structures to procure a better social and economic performance. What exists is changed to build something better. However, what happens when those changes are inadequate, insufficient, erroneous, contradictory or non-existent?

This is the history of Mexico in the last decades and now it is repeating itself, but inversely: formerly attempting to construct something new, now seeking to restore what there was before. The easy part is to blame this or that on what was done in the past or what is being done now, but the reality is that Mexico has for decades been subject to experimentation without the commitment (or even the real intention) or carrying out those reforms or the present “transformation” in integral fashion.

The countries that have executed flourishing transformations are characterized by political negotiations -among the politicians who represent the society and their diverse interests- to define and agree upon the final objective, and the costs they are disposed to assume.  The case of Spain is exceedingly eloquent: the famous debates of Felipe González during his years as leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) show how he faced his counterparts head on to define objectives, arrive at solutions, and attend to the consequences of these. Once the political negotiation was resolved, the “technicians” were put in charge of implementation, the way already paved.

In Mexico the process was exactly the opposite: here the objectives and strategies were defined by the technicians and then the politicians, lacking any incentive to cooperate, had to deal with the consequences. Yet more importantly, though it may seem paradoxical, that manner of proceeding limited the reach of the proposed reforms because the technicians themselves adjusted them to the political realities that they perceived. That is, instead of subjecting the transformation that they envisioned to broad political negotiation, they resorted to the circus stunt of preserving the status quo (maintaining the political system in form and the party in power) while the structures of the economy were altered, with evident impacts on the social order.

In this context, it is not by chance that in Spain a democracy was consolidated while the economy was being transformed, while Mexicans ended up with a split economy (modern and old, exporter and protected, productive and unproductive) and a political system in permanent strife. Additionally, Spain is not exceptional: there are multiple nations in Asia, South America and Europe that have carried out sensitive transformations in an integral way.

President López Obrador has been a stubborn critic of the reforms initiated after the 1982 economic collapse, but his own proposal, beyond his moral streak (attack corruption, poverty and inequality), suffers from the same transgression as that of his very indefatigable predecessors: he tries to impose it relentlessly, without discussion and, in the best of cases, with rigged surveys, and an interminable gift of gab designed to hush up a most incommensurate reality. Worse still, in contrast with the “neoliberals” he so revels in berating, on eliminating the entire technical capacity the government used to possess there can be no advancement of projects susceptible of generating income, wealth or jobs.

Looking back, past the scope of individuals and political parties, the results produced by governmental management since the end of the sixties to date are atrocious. Certainly, advances in various rubrics are impacting (and AMLO himself benefits from the financial stability as well as from the vitality of the export sector), but it is equally certain that an immense portion of the population does not sense improvement, above all in contrast with the expectations and promises accompanying those reforms (former and present).

López Obrador delights in beleaguering his predecessors, but before the cock crows, he will find himself on the other side of the podium with infinitely fewer valuable results (in fact, the majority of these negative) with which to defend himself.  Suffice to observe the corruption typifying his government, the burgeoning poverty and the incessant insecurity. Worst of all for him would be a scenario in which whoever succeeds him were to persist in the tactic of confrontation: confrontation with him.

The question now is what is it that is required to get out of the hole in which Mexicans find themselves and the one that the president continues to dig deeper one a.m. press conference after another. AMLO built his career by enlivening and exploiting social resentment which, while containing and diminishing the risk of a social explosion, has done nothing, aside from his narrative, to channel that capacity of mobilization toward the transformation of the national structures to achieve a more vigorous and equitable economy. No one, beginning with the president himself, should harbor the expectation of a promising future.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

 Luis Rubio

In 2014, when Russia invaded and took control of the Crimean Peninsula, President Obama’s reaction was that this is “so 19th century” and no longer done in the 21st. Everything indicates that this memorandum did not reach the Kremlin. The invasion of Ukraine, of which Crimea was then a part, shows that geopolitics is as alive as ever. Nations are moved by interests, not by ideology, a memorandum that has not reached Mexico’s national palace either.

Behind the invasion of Ukraine there are two elements: one is the strategy of the West (the United States and Europe) throughout the decades after the end of the cold war; and the other is Russia’s ambition to restore its sources of strategic depth. For many years, US policy focused on distancing the then Soviet Union from China, with the aim of preventing the other two major world powers from approaching each other. However, starting in the 1990s, this strategy was abandoned less for clarity of direction than for the inertia generated by the victory of the West over the former communist power.

What the West did not contemplate was the impact that this would have on Russia, a nation that, under the leadership of Putin, has devoted itself to recreating its zone of influence. In 2008 it invaded part of Georgia, in 2014 it took Crimea, in 2020 it forced an electoral result in Belarus, which was followed by Nagorno-Karabakh and, more recently, it restored peace in Kazakhstan, remaining as the guarantor of internal order. The strategy is evident, leaving only two weak flanks: Ukraine and the Baltics. Putin has employed a variety of means, not all of them violent, to achieve his goal. The invasion of Ukraine -direct action and without proxies- could well change the course of the world because now no one can ignore its implications.

The reverberations of Ukraine are beginning to be felt in immediate indicators, such as the prices of raw materials, particularly oil, because that region is especially relevant in this matter, and grains, and, eventually, in the growth rates of the economies most affected, especially in Europe. But the greatest impact of this intervention will foreseeably be felt in the return of the zones of influence in the world, a phenomenon that had already been taking shape in the South China Sea and around Russia. The one that is missing, and the one that affects Mexico, is the Western Hemisphere.

The end of the cold war was interpreted very differently in Russia and in the West. Although history could have been different (newspapers, magazines and social media these days are saturated with lamentations to this effect), the tangible fact is that instead of converging, the West and Russia moved in opposite directions. Beyond recriminations, some valid others not, the West took advantage of the end of the cold war to focus on improving the lives of its citizens, assuming that Russia was nothing more than, in the words of a famous politician, “a gas station with nuclear weapons.” Well, now it turns out that this gas station is forcing the West out of its lethargy and that has fundamental implications for Mexico.

In the 1980s, just as the cold war was winding down, Mexico chose to approach the United States to solve its economic problems. Contrary to the prediction of the catastrophists, the rapprochement gave Mexico enormous freedoms in terms of foreign policy because NAFTA constituted an agreement on the essence of the relationship, a shared vision of the future. The point was not to agree on each and every issue, but to commit to resolving them so that closeness would confer security to the Americans and development to Mexico.

In terms of development, the scheme worked less well than desired because Mexico did not carry out the internal transformation that this would have required; however, in terms of the bilateral relationship, perhaps the most complex border in the world, problems were resolved and both governments did what was necessary to avoid unnecessary conflicts.

Two things have changed. One is called Trump and the other López Obrador. Trump violated the essence of the understanding of 1988 in two ways: one, attacking Mexico and blaming it for his country’s problems; and the other, by link issues (migration vs. exports) he violated the explicit agreement never to do that.

López Obrador was key in the process of ratifying the TMEC, but his vision is clearly opposed to such closeness. Step by step, he has distanced Mexico from American priorities and, like the kid who challenges his teacher, he flirts with China and Russia as if it were a game.

In recent weeks, the Americans have abandoned their obvious decision not to respond to López Obrador and have begun to define their “red lines” clearly and precisely, most of these aimed at forcing Mexico to avoid further internal deterioration. Putin’s actions can only accelerate this process because the US will once again begin to see the world with a geopolitical logic, where Mexico is in the front row. The Mexican government no longer has much room to maneuver, especially if it wants to protect what little is left of economic growth, all linked to exports to the US.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof