In the golden era of the National Action Party (PAN), the nineties, the party had strong, focused leaderships and a strategic vision that permitted it to begin to build, step by step, the scaffolding that led to its eventually winning the presidency. It was a party of citizens, financed by donations from the society. The mediocrity of its performance and of its leaderships in the successive years took place during the era of governmental financing. Might this be mere coincidence?
The performance of a political party is the result of a multiplicity of factors and cannot be simplified to the degree that the latter paragraph suggests. What can be stated, because it is obvious, is that the PAN did not achieve converting itself into an effective and successful governing party at the federal level. With many exceptions throughout its history of individuals, men and women, who proved to be extraordinary politicians and leaders, in general, the PAN members are not individuals with a vocation for power, something strange for a political party whose raison d’être is precisely that. Distinguished Mexicans of all socioeconomic levels have passed through the PAN, the majority desirous of constructing “a free and generous native land” as its motto has it, but with little inclination for confronting the dilemmas that characterize the labor of governing, which tend to be tough and often less than clear in moral terms.
In contrast, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is a party of power, born out of power and it always recruited persons whose nature and vocation comprised exactly the search for and administration of power. In an article from several years back, Aguilar Camin cites Juan Lezama with an anecdote that describes the PRI cover to cover in its Golden Age: “Then, Elpidio Mendoza attended his first successful anteroom session in the new PRIist era and arrived at the Campaign Desk. –Profession? -Politics. -I mean, what is it that you do and know. -Politics. -But a Doctorate, a master’s degree, a profession, something useful… -Just politics –repeated Elpidio Mendoza as he turned on his heel. And stick it out.”
The biographies of the PAN and the PRI are very distinct, starting with that the former had been engendered expressly as a reaction to the latter. Many citizens associate the PRI with corruption, while the PAN’s main driving force was its criticism of the PRI and the corruption. However, once in power, the PAN mimicked the PRI and became as corrupt as a governing party as its predecessor had been, but running a very inferior quality of governance. Nothing describes the contrast better than the declaration of a PRI politician at the time of the Peña Nieto presidential campaign, proudly declaring that “we might be corrupt but we know how to govern.”
Now that the Electoral Tribunal has endorsed the misdeeds of the current PRI leadership, whose objective appears to be to imitate the conduct of the parties in the service of the highest bidder, all this in the context of an opposition that is clearly in the minority, of almost irrelevance given the abusive way in which the distribution of seats in Congress was carried out, the question is whether either of these two parties will have the capacity to transform themselves in order to compete successfully against the almost hegemonic (but not uniform) movement that governs the country today, or whether new organizations will be born that are capable of competing.
The PAN is currently a much larger party in terms of votes won than the PRI, but both have come face to face with the imperative need to rethink themselves, re-conceive themselves, restructure themselves and transform themselves into forces able to compete successfully with the Morena party in the elections of the coming decades, but starting in 2027 at the federal level and, much sooner, at the local level. Their alternative is plain and simple: die.
After the failed and poorly organized alliance of 2024, each of these formations will continue along its own trajectory, leaving the citizenry who did not vote for Morena (a nothing-to-be-sneered-at 45% of the total) before the tessitura of who could effectively represent it and safeguard its concerns and hopes. The myths and aversions at play between these two groupings are legendary (many justified) and there are wide swaths of the electorate that would never vote for one or the other. In this context, the question is whether one of these will be capable of, effectively, responding to the moment, the circumstance and the demands of the citizenry. The inevitable problems that will confront the Morena government constitute an enormous incentive for that transformation.
As it stands, the outlook for the opposition is not commendable. The cost and complexity of creating a new political party is high, but my impression is that the decline of the PRI constitutes an exceptional opportunity for young and attractive leaders, under the guidance of experienced, illustrious and focused (ex) PRI politicians, to have a high probability of success. Freed from the yoke of the pathetic PRI leadership, the group of powerful women and men who are veterans of many fights, with a quality as statesmen that is almost non-existent in the other organizations, could make a big difference. If this group of visionary characters were capable of building a new political party, free of the scourges that characterized the PRI, it could become an unstoppable force against a Morena, a party-movement that seems to be hegemonic but has such a propensity to fracture, fragment and corrupt, in addition to the enormous governance dilemmas it will face, that it could well be defeated sooner than it might appear.
In July of 1914, one month before the outbreak of World War I, none of the protagonists in what would be a bloody conflagration had any idea of what was to come or, as Christopher Clark writes, they stumbled along like sleepwalkers toward the precipice. The present moment in Mexico entertains a great similarity to the description: the new government is absolutely certain of its vision, which impedes it from assessing what is happening around it whether as a threat, or as the opportunity it could be.
The judicial reform generates antibodies on both sides of the discussion: for those who support it, the new mantra is the universal solution for the country’s problems of justice; for those who vilify it, the new law constitutes a danger to the most basic values of democracy and economic stability. In the earthly world, as diverse interviewees illustrated within the halls of the legislative chambers when the vote for the reform was conducted, the majority of the representatives and senators were not appraised of the content of what they were voting for, nor did they consider whether the bill comprised a viable solution for the problem set forth. Most of the legislators being interviewed did not even know how many articles there are in the Mexican Constitution. The point here is that the judicial reform disrupts the whole system of government, but those responsible for approving it never gave serious thought to the reform’s relevance or implications.
Last week the Supreme Court decided to advance the request to revise the process of approval of the judicial reform and the separation of powers. I am not an attorney, so I will not seek to litigate the affair, but the reaction of Morena Party leaders as well as of President Scheinbaum suggest a full rejection of any action, or interpretation, which does not strictly adhere to the official orthodoxy. And this before having the least notion of what the content could be re what the Supreme Court produces. The obligatory question is whether this is a constructive manner of advancing development or, thinking in terms of the anecdote of WWI, whether there is no way of avoiding a crisis that would place in question the objectives of the government itself, and the country’s future
Some individuals in the administration recognize the inborn risks of the implementation of the reform and its potential consequences both for justice itself (allegedly the objective here) as well as for economic development. However, were one to observe the broader context, the action of the Court opens an enormous opportunity for President Sheinbaum. A more receptive stance could achieve, in one fell swoop, consolidating her government, opening the door to private investment, above all foreign, and laying the foundations of the Rule of Law, the absence of which the country has experienced almost throughout its entire existence. In a word, changing the optics could perhaps render possible the takeoff of the fledgling government.
The judicial reform’s rationale is strictly political. While it is evident that the country lacks a system of justice that effectively attends to and resolves the problems and disputes involving the complaints of the population’s majority, the reform does not focus on any of that. To start with, the overwhelming majority of the issues that the population is concerned with or complain about refer to the states, the latter different from those of the federal jurisdiction, that is the main objective of the reform. Also, it is evident to an even greater extent that the reform would never have been promoted had Minister Zaldívar remained on the Court, thus relinquishing that halo of legitimacy and power that Morena members attribute to the bill.
More to the point, no government in the world likes to have its power limited. Therefore, presidents resort to decrees (to avoid approaching the Legislature) or they nominate justices, magistrates or ministers whom they consider germane to their project.
The reason for the separation of powers is, precisely, that of conferring certainty and predictability on the citizenry in general and on the diverse actors and social agents in particular. The stronger the Executive, ergo the objective of the judicial reform, the lesser the economic development and the greater the uncertainty. That is, if the government attempts to be successful in its projects, it must accept the existence of effective and credible counterweights. The dilemma is real.
In the United States, the Supreme Court was a weak counterweight at the start and, as happens everywhere, the government strove to maintain it thus, beginning with the attempt, in 1800, of an administration to saturate the Judiciary with sympathetic judges, which the following government sought to revert, overturning the respective law. In the constitutional controversy that ensued, Marbury v Madison, the Supreme Court assumed the faculties of constitutional revision, which permitted it to resolve the specific dispute between the incoming and outgoing administrations, but additionally to establish the Court as an arbiter of controversies between the other public branches of government.
The point is that President Sheinbaum cradles in her hands the opportunity to transform the country much beyond what she probably imagined. On accepting the possibility of modifying or, indeed, abolishing the reform, the country would acquire the foundation of a true separation of powers, and she would consolidate her platform to effectively drive the inclusive and equitable development of the country.
“Democracy, writes the scholar Larry Diamond, is a system of government of the majority, limited by counterweights and institutional balances.” This classic definition is clearly not among the new government’s priorities.
A speech, however encouraging, does not a summer make, but it can constitute the first step in the process of reconstruction that the country urgently needs. Beyond personal loyalties and common histories, the past six-year term was not a paragon of virtues, except for those who depend on the government: those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder and those (almost) on the bottom. To prosper, as proposed in the speech by Madam President, it is indispensable to open competition and generate productive enterprises, not governmental contracts and a population dependent on the government. The political profit of both is evident, as reflected in the election, but this does not comprise a solid or sustainable (or financially viable) platform of development, of economic growth or of the reduction of poverty and inequality.
Eliminating the mechanisms that permit, that should indeed guarantee, freedoms and citizen rights, as has been happening on repeated occasions over the last months, implies eradicating legal predictability in a country that requires a much more dynamic economy than the existing one and that, perforce, must attract foreign investment.
The latter is key because Mexico is experiencing an unwonted moment during which all anchors of stability assembled throughout the 20th century disappeared, while those anchors that were attempted to be developed to replace the previous ones, all this in the past three or four decades, did not succeed in their objective.
The country today boasts free elections (this difficult to deny by the new government); very weak, not to say nearly inexistent, protections of citizen rights; and a very differentiated citizenry between those who followed the outgoing president faithfully, and the citizenry that clamored for a schema of counterweights. The departing government eroded the little that did exist and, in its final onslaughts, ended up sowing the seeds of a potential re-creation of the authoritarianism of a century ago, or worse.
The institutional approach is more Bolshevik than liberal or, as the British would say, far from Edmund Burke, the philosopher who critically analyzed the French Revolution, concluding that the key was in the preservation of the laws and freedoms, by means of a competent government. From that perspective, the best that can be expected from the recently installed government is, if everything turns out right, a competent government.
The philosophy that seems to embody the new President diverges from that which the country was trying (sort of) to build in terms of a functional government while being delimited by the structures of the Rule of Law, by considering it necessary to hold monopoly of power -rather than of the law- to advance the country’s development. Both the recent reforms, as well as the frequently employed tools such as preventive imprisonment, could very easily be converted into a mechanism of control and of the submission of a society that, independently of its vote, has demonstrated a historical inclination toward freedom.
It is not unduly excessive here to repeat the famous phrase of Porfirio Díaz, without question no liberal, who stated that “governing Mexicans is more difficult than rounding up turkeys on horseback.” The Mexican, independently of their socioeconomic situation, does not submit easily, as the old colonial saying of “I will obey but will not comply” suggests. Although she calls it freedom, the implicit pretention to subordinate a populace that lives on a day-by-day basis and depends on exports is extraordinarily ambitious, if not rash.
In fact, the new orthodoxy deviates from the previous one. For example, in the previous administration appointments to key entities such as the National Human Rights Commission, the National Electoral Institute, the Supreme Court and, even, the Bank of Mexico were driven by loyalty. Today’s criteria is ideological: whomever fits is welcome; the rest are left out. With this I do not mean to suggest that the nominations of her predecessors were pristine or always ideal, but there was, at the very least, the goal, even the propensity, to name persons “technically” qualified for the critical posts, something surely not a criterion in recent years.
In his writings on Napoleon, Simon Schama describes this personage as “was the prototype of a modern despot, cynically assuming that the majority of the people cared little or nothing for liberty or constitutions or the vaunted ‘sovereignty of the people’ and so he could easily dispossess them of it, substituting for freedom the pyrrhic dazzle of military triumph.” If one were to remove from this sentence the last two words, military triumph, and were to substitute electoral victory for them, the scheme does not seem all that alien.
Whether one likes it or not, the future of Mexico is bound to the rest of the world. Ratifying or adopting measures, laws and regulations that reduce or eliminate counterweights and attempting against the most basic principles of the Rule of Law, this understood as the protection of citizen rights with respect to governmental action, is counterproductive for the President herself, and implies to play with fire and call into question everything the she says she wants to achieve.
The end of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador opens a new stage for the Mexican political system. In the last half-century, Mexico went from a highly structured system around a political party that was also a complex system of participation and control to a shallow democracy with weak institutions that have now been seriously eroded, if not destroyed. Thanks to the strength of his personality and political skill, López Obrador maintained the cohesion of Mexican politics in general and of his party in particular, which hid the severe and accelerated political degradation behind the scenes. Now, with the succession resolved, the risks and fractures with which the winner of the election and the country in general will have to deal will become evident. The outgoing president planned to concentrate, consolidate, and exercise power, his personal power, but not for the future of the country.
The great magic of the old political system lay in the expectation that there would always be a new opportunity to reinvent the country with the change of governments. The mechanism was inherent in the political structure derived from the pacts that shaped the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, the “grandfather” of the PRI) and which, much later, Cosío Villegas would call a “non-heritable sexennial monarchy.” The critical factor lay in the fact that the power of the president was not disputed but at the same time had limited validity, so the country could reinvent itself in the next round, which yielded a factor of certainty during the six-year term, but of absolute uncertainty regarding the future: the only thing that remained was the hope that the next government, by reinventing the wheel, would solve the problems, the new and the ancestral ones, and create opportunities for the future. Authoritarian or not, the system worked for several decades because it allowed a change in the political elite and preserved the hope for a better future. At the end of each six-year term, the same concerns were debated: from the role or influence of the outgoing president to the stability of the economy. Nothing has changed in that, except the dimensions of what is at stake, but that difference – the additional degree of uncertainty – is entirely due to the outgoing president.
When a government was bad, it was stated that “no evil lasts six years, and no people can stand it.” When it was good, the citizenry rewarded it with a favorable vote in the successor’s election. The process was dynamic and demonstrated a high degree of understanding on the part of the so-called “revolutionary family” of both its mission as a provider of conditions for economic growth and its concern for citizen sentiment. The political system of the time was not democratic (nor did it pretend to be), but it evidenced a recognition of the need to act in response to the needs of the citizenry. Above all, the “system,” whose heart lay in the presidency-PRI binomial, was sustained by the PRI, the institution that conferred continuity, control, and discipline.
Over the decades, each president pursued economic strategies that sought to respond to the circumstances of the moment, and, for much of the 20th century, those circumstances were relatively simple compared to today’s world, facilitating an essentially introspective view. The combination of concentrated power around the presidency and the ability to modify government strategies according to the president’s reading of the specific moment had significant consequences. In fact, this characteristic made the rulers directly responsible to the population for the future of their government because, when their actions were successful, they were rewarded by the electorate; however, when the results of their administration failed due to their own actions or for ignoring the international context (as occurred in the seventies and early eighties), the cost was borne entirely by those presidents, who suffered widespread opprobrium after their government. Claudia Sheinbaum’s election result leaves no room for doubt about where Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be at the end of his term.
Good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, popular or not, the presidents of yesteryear did not take a step without a huarache: when the time of succession came, they resorted to transactional mechanisms to ensure a favorable vote, in addition to employing all the electoral fraud mechanisms necessary to ensure an overwhelming triumph. Indeed, PRI victories were legendary, frequently reaching votes exceeding 80% of the total vote (and in 1976, there was not even an opposition candidate competing with José López Portillo). The use of government handouts in exchange for votes is not exceptional when looking at the rest of the world (the nature of the exchange varies, but not the fact itself), while systematic fraud of the sort that came to take place in some elections in the mid-20th century certainly was. Today, in 2024, we find ourselves in another stage of Mexican politics in which political competition is real, and the rules for the administration of the electoral processes and the qualification of the election are the product of autonomous entities that enjoy broad legitimacy and widespread recognition. This, of course, does not prevent the presence of all kinds of deceptions to influence how citizens vote, but these occur mainly outside the scope of the National Electoral Institute.
The country’s political reality is one of deep contrasts -for example, very successful regions and other very backward ones- but today, there is a wealth of information regarding these circumstances that would have been inconceivable only a few decades ago. Today, the channels of communication that facilitate public discussion of national issues favor the advance and retreat of political and partisan options, as well as the emergence of citizen candidacies, something also difficult to imagine in the recent past. Of course, Mexico is far from a consolidated democracy, a widely successful economy, or a minimally satisfied society. Still, it is no longer the self-absorbed, isolated, and poor nation of a few decades ago. In a word, the political reality of the country has changed dramatically, except for the current president’s attempt to return to the most primitive and condemnable practices of the past, including the agenda of constitutional reforms he proposed on February 5, 2024, whose common denominator consists of constitutionally strengthening the presidency and reducing the mechanisms for counterbalancing and protecting the citizenry from State actions.
This is the only way to explain his crusade and unbridled activism to guarantee the electoral result of his preference, for which he was clearly willing to use any resource, starting with the purchase of votes, followed by the control of the institutions and entities responsible for the conduction, administration, and qualification of the election, essentially the National Electoral Institute (INE), as well as the respective Tribunal. In the same sense, he used the presidential pulpit to promote his messages and his candidates and to attack and disqualify any dissent or criticism. In light of the outcome of the presidential election, it is evident that his crusade was successful in terms of the victory achieved by his candidate, leaving the determination of the broader consequences of his actions to the future. This confirms that the presidential actions throughout the six-year term had the primary objective of achieving this success. What remains to be elucidated is whether his investment in sources of loyalty to himself will have additional implications.
The Strategy
The first indication that President López Obrador’s six-year term would be different from that of his predecessors was evident from the moment his disinterest-indeed, radical opposition to promoting economic growth became clear. In contrast to all his predecessors since the end of the Mexican Revolution more than a century ago, President López Obrador does not conceive of government or power as an instrument for the country’s economic development. While all of his predecessors focused on promoting economic activity, some with more success than others, this government’s priority, from the beginning, was the succession of 2024 and nothing else. For the president, the objective and rationality of his government were merely power and guaranteeing a safe succession that would continue with his way of seeing the world. Now, in the twilight of the six-year term, the country will have to begin to understand and deal with the consequences of such a poorly institutionalized government for the future of the country.
The formal structure of the division of powers of the Mexican political system did not correspond to the reality of power that characterized it throughout the 20th century. While there was a judiciary and a legislature, the dominance of the executive branch was legendary. However, this dominance was tempered by the existence of the official party, whose institutional structure favored the turnover of elites and the continuity of power. The famous British call that “the king is dead, long live the king” was reproduced in the Mexican system in an (almost) natural way, allowing the assumption of power and the definition of its limits. In recent decades, for various reasons, Mexico has experienced the extinction of this political control and institutional structure, presumably to be replaced by a democratic system that was never fully consolidated. Because of this, important questions remain that only time will elucidate, beginning with the power of the outgoing president after his successor is inaugurated and the potential emergence of competitive power structures in the form of regional or national caudillos. In other words, institutional weakness is now gaining new momentum as an issue of paramount importance.
AMLO and the Economy
One of the paradoxes of the six-year term that ended lies in the economy’s growth. Although the president opted for a strategy that expressly refrained from promoting growth (and the public and private investment that would have been necessary to achieve that result), the circumstances of the country and the world translated into relatively unusual growth rates in the second half of the presidential term. In the administration’s first year, the economy did not grow, and then came the pandemic, which severely contracted economic activity; however, by the fourth year, the economy began to accelerate to 3.1% in 2023. This figure is slightly higher than the 2.5% average experienced over the past three decades, but what is significant is that previous administrations devoted enormous financial, bureaucratic, and human resources to investment promotion. However, in a paradox of history, it was the president who did not carry out such investments (and opposed them) who benefited from those decades of reforms and who is now seen especially in the strength of the export sector (especially manufacturing, agribusiness and mining), which functions independently of (some would say despite) government activity. In fact, this should not be surprising: the main objective of negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement at the beginning of the 1990s was to depoliticize investment decisions. The aim was to provide certainty to investors that future Mexican governments would not change the rules of the game thanks to the existence of an international treaty. The paradox is that the greatest beneficiary of that treaty and the reforms that followed was the president, who opposed the reforms and consistently denounced them.
Throughout the López Obrador administration and despite the rhetoric that “the poor come first”, for the president, the poor were merely an electoral instrument because reducing poverty was against his succession objective. Although it may seem contradictory, the president, a connoisseur of power, chose to ensure his succession not by improving the population’s living standards but by building a structure of loyalties that would guarantee that the population owed its vote to the president or to whomever he chose. While an improvement in disposable income for families obviously contributes to reducing poverty, the subsidies that the president sought in cash transfers followed a political logic, not an economic one. Getting out of poverty would imply entering the labor market in such a way that this exit would acquire permanence and a gradual increase in both the income and the capital of the members of the family that was once in poverty (an objective that, at least nominally, was pursued by programs of previous six-year terms, such as Progresa, Prospera and the like). In a word, a strategy to break with poverty – especially in the digital era – requires sustained economic growth and the availability of means to increase people’s social capital, especially education and health.
President López Obrador’s strategy had a different objective: the improvement of family income through direct cash transfers that, by definition, would lessen the symptoms of poverty, but would not diminish it; instead, it implied a relationship of dependency. There is no contradiction in this: the objective was to create dependency on the government that would translate into loyalty to the person of the president, which required that the “structural,” so to speak, situation of people in poverty not change. The rationale for this logic was very clear and conscious: in the words of Morena’s president at the beginning of the six-year term, “When you take people out of poverty, and they become middle class, they forget where they come from, because people think the way they live.” In short, the poor are a reserve of votes, and the last thing that suits Morena is to have fewer poor people and more middle-class people because those people stop conceiving themselves as “people” to think as citizens. Economic growth ends up being a curse for the only objective that allegedly motivated this administration: to ensure the triumph in 2024.
The economic evolution of the six-year term that concluded has not been exactly as the president planned it, at least according to the conception outlined by the president of Morena mentioned in the previous paragraph. First, the cash transfers made by the government, but in the name of the president, as if it were his own money, have had the effect of improving the lives of the people who appear in the census that the president and his team built (whose formal criteria and nominal list are not public). In other words, the transfers have successfully strengthened the individuals and families who are beneficiaries of these programs (seniors, youth, and other target audiences). Still, dependence on the government, which is the express objective, is preserved. As the attached graph illustrates, the increase in the population’s consumption throughout the second half of the six-year term is clear evidence of the success of the presidential strategy. It explains, at least in part, the loyalty experienced by the president during these years on the part of the benefited population and, of course, their vote last June 2nd.
Secondly, the increase in the minimum wage promoted by the president benefits the entire population within the formal economy, raising the real disposable income of an important segment of the citizenry. The transfers and the minimum wage modified the population’s perceptions and probably constituted an important factor in explaining the president’s popularity. However, although he benefits from these actions, the dynamics of each of them are different: while the cash transfers have a direct and tangible electoral objective, the minimum wage increase is more difficult to politicize because its beneficiaries are generic, not specific; that is, all those who earn a minimum wage benefit, not only those who are within Morena’s electoral roll. One way or another, the average population has experienced an improvement in its real income after inflation, which also explains the increase in consumption at the popular level.
The Economy and Votes
The governments of yesteryear -from the Revolution to 2018- sought votes through two paths: on the one hand, they sought to adopt economic and investment strategies that would translate into significant economic improvement that would, in turn, raise living standards and thus satisfy the population, trusting that this would translate into a favorable vote for the outgoing government. From the rural infrastructure development programs in the 1930s to the highway construction program, the expansion of the electrical grid, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, to cite three very different types of strategies, all governments sought to accelerate the economy’s growth. The success of the first decades after the end of the Revolution can be seen not only in the growth of the economy itself but also in social mobility, the growth of cities, and, with them, of an incipient middle class. Just as there were highly successful governments (those of the era known as “stabilizing development” between the forties and the beginning of the seventies stand out), there were also those whose ambitions were much more significant than their capacity to lead the national economy, as occurred in the seventies, which culminated in the foreign debt crisis of 1982. In this sense, some of those governments were highly successful, while others provoked terrible crises. Still, there was not a single one that had not followed the logic of progress through economic growth, similar to what one could observe almost anywhere on the planet.
The government of President López Obrador broke with that rationality. Convinced that the country’s problems began with, and are a product of, the reforms undertaken since the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s, the president set about rebuilding the idyllic world of his memory as a PRI leader in his home state of Tabasco. The central elements of his vision are summarized as: a strong presidency that decides without limitation by autonomous or regulatory bodies; PEMEX as the main source of demand in the economy; economic power subordinated to political power; and the construction of a hegemonic party, for which it is legitimate to use all the resources of the State. What was never clear in the presidential project before his inauguration in 2018 was the abandonment of the developmental project characteristic of all presidents throughout the twentieth century.
For the president, the only important thing was his succession project, an objective for which all the resources and capacities of the government were allocated, starting with the most successful of all, the so-called “mañanera,” a daily exercise of communication and manipulation of public opinion that achieved and consolidated the high level of popularity enjoyed by the president, even when the economy, security, health and education, among other key factors for the life of the citizenry, experienced serious deteriorations.
In this context, how the government sought to ensure presidential succession relied on political rather than economic initiatives. Consequently, everything done throughout the six-year term followed a strictly electoral logic: where are the votes and how to ensure that government programs make them dependent on government handouts, but always in the president’s name. Transfers to senior citizens, youth, and other target audiences had a strictly political logic, and the evidence shows that poverty was not one of the relevant criteria. In other words, the narrative was integrated with a discourse of fighting poverty, but the government’s strategy was much more direct as if it were a laser beam: to secure votes. Whether the combination of discourse, narrative, and transfers will succeed remains to be seen.
Unlike his predecessors, the president sought to build a platform of dependence on his person; similar to his predecessors, he developed a series of mechanisms dedicated to buying votes. In the post-revolutionary era, many governments sought votes following a transactional logic: candidates invented all sorts of mechanisms to exchange favors for votes. In one era, they distributed household goods; in another, they distributed breakfasts or food, all in exchange for the promise of a vote; more recently, they invented cards that produced cash in ATMs. The mechanics were facilitated, at the same time that the degree of certainty of the effectiveness of the exchange was raised, with the appearance and generalization of the use of cellular telephones, since with that, the providers of benefits exchange the favor for the photograph of the vote itself. Whatever the mechanics, ancient or modern, the purpose was always transparent. Regardless of the performance of the outgoing government, the candidate offers an “incentive” for the voter to respond favorably on election day. If one adds the two together, the electoral project acquires an inexorable political meaning.
Many of the electoral strategies that characterized the PRI era of the 20th century were eradicated by the electoral reform of 1996, which legislated (with the unanimous approval of all the political forces of the time) the creation of not only an autonomous authority dedicated to the administration of the elections and the qualification of the election. With this, all kinds of devices well known by Mexicans throughout the 20th century disappeared, some with peculiar names (such as the “crazy mouse”), but all of them aimed at achieving the expected result through the manipulation of the electoral roll, the factious use of the media or the abuse of governmental instruments to close the opposition’s way. With the 1996 reform, all these practices were prohibited. Although what followed was not perfect, it constituted a scheme of impeccable fairness for electoral competition, as shown by the innumerable alternations of parties in power at all levels of government. One of the questions raised by the recent election is whether these judgments are still valid: the result was so overwhelming that it opens a vast range of possibilities, much of it potentially regressive.
The electoral reform referred to, in its constitutional component, was unanimously approved by all political forces of the time, except for the PRD, Morena’s predecessor, which refused to vote in favor of the secondary legislation. That is to say, there was always a reticence, if not skepticism, within the contingent that today leads Morena concerning the electoral legislation and the institutions that emanate from it. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that López Obrador refused to recognize the 2006 electoral result and that he and a good part of his followers continue to argue that his defeat resulted from electoral fraud. Twelve years later, the president confronted the INE board on repeated occasions, and through the appointment of people loyal to him, he devoted himself to weakening, if not subjugating, the electoral authority to his preferences. This closes the siege built by the president, which includes all the elements he was structuring to ensure his victory in the June 2024 elections: the narrative, the money transfers, the electoral authority, and his own political activism and control of a large part of the country’s institutional apparatus.
The Polls
Another enigma that only time will allow to clarify lies in the enormous variance -highly different preferences among them- in the different pollsters’ results throughout the electoral process. In addition to this, decades after the country began to have professionally managed electoral processes and a significant improvement in the living standards of the population, the six-year term that now concludes has created a paradox that only time will allow to clarify in full: while the number of people who assume themselves as citizens grows, loyalty to the president due to his narrative and social programs also strengthens. Will this be a contradiction? An incongruity? Time will tell.
According to a survey by Alejandro Moreno (El Financiero, May 2, 2023), sixty percent of Mexicans say they are satisfied with their lives, have seen their real income grow, and have a job. The same 60% support the president and consider that his administration has made possible the stability and well-being they enjoy. On the other hand, the remaining 40% disapprove of the president’s management because they consider that it is damaging the foundations of future welfare and threatening the prospects for growth and well-being. One wonders what makes two groups in the same society have such radically contrasting perceptions of the same phenomenon or historical moment. According to Moreno, the fundamental difference between the two groups of Mexicans is the level of schooling: while the university vote was crucial in the president’s election in 2018, today, that cohort represents the most critical segment of their work. The two most substantial contingents underpinning the president’s popularity are older Mexicans and people with less schooling. The inescapable conclusion is that those most disadvantaged in their income and prospects for life and employment have benefited from economic stability, growth in real disposable income, and a labor market that, post-pandemic, has offered greater employment opportunities. At the same time, this logic carries the seeds of its own future dysfunctionality, given that the most dynamic economy with the best prospects is one linked to the information economy, which, by definition, requires a radically different type of education than the one favored by the president. Another paradox: poor but with spending power, a recipe for a single election.
Twenty-eight years after the landmark 1996 electoral reform, the country has advanced in certain aspects but has regressed in many others and, thanks to the laws (and tactics) promoted by the government in electoral matters (the famous “Plan B,” followed by “Plan C”), the likelihood of further deterioration in both political and security matters can no longer be discounted. The outstanding achievement in electoral matters -certainty about the process, but not about the outcome- could well be reversed in an attempt to impose an outcome regardless of the electorate’s will. That reform, a great citizen triumph -perhaps the greatest in our history- could be seeing its last days.
And this is all the more important in light of how little progress Mexican democracy has made in all other areas. Although progress was made in electoral matters from 1997 onwards (the first federal election after 1996, already with an “even floor”), the country could hardly be called democratic when no more than 58% of the electorate* claims to be citizens (versus 42% who assume themselves to be “people”), hardly a majority willing (and able) to defend their rights. More to the point, no one could seriously argue that the country enjoys peace, a path towards greater equality of opportunities, an effective system of government, “prompt and expeditious” justice, and transparency and accountability on the part of the responsible authorities. Clearly, things have changed, in many cases improved, from the “hard-line” PRI era, but Mexico does not fully qualify as democratic by conventional international measures.
This picture suggests that Mexico has returned – or at least is moving in the direction of – a prehistoric, indeed pre-democratic, era of national political life. The president has not had the slightest scruple in employing all the resources at his disposal to secure his electoral objective. When a path was closed to him -for example, a call from INE (already biased) to refrain from being so crass in its forms- he invented twenty constitutional reforms (the “Plan C”) to be able to have a “legal” presence in the political and, therefore, electoral sphere, every day. He also did not have the slightest qualms in presenting himself as the head of the campaign of his candidate, whom he named, controlled, and obstructed throughout the process (which, in addition, raised all kinds of speculations about the relationship that would characterize the two political actors after the elections of June 2024).
President López Obrador’s legacy will be multifaceted. His economic strategy achieved its goal, but the extraordinary increase in the fiscal deficit by 2024 leaves a question mark over the stability and sustainability with which his successor will receive the fiscal accounts; his security strategy enjoys an almost unanimous level of disapproval; his electoral strategy was successful in achieving his goal of electing the successor of his choice, but at the cost of a severe deterioration of the political institutions, including the electoral ones, which were built over the past four decades.
Mythical leaders enjoy temporary advantages but almost always end up being ephemeral in the long term. The bills of a government that is poor in results -arrogant and, at the same time, modest in its objectives- will be paid sooner or later. Still, the calendar may not respect economic, political, or emotional times. The bills always arrive, and it will be there where the circumstances of the moment and the astuteness of the winner will determine the outcome and her capacity to govern. It is worse when the country the president leaves behind lacks solid institutions capable of conferring viability to the government and governance and without the characteristics and skills of the president himself.
Beyond the election itself, the political-structural legacy of the government will be much more transcendent and relevant than is apparent, but not necessarily in a benign way. Because of his history and characteristics, the outgoing president is unrepeatable, and the election winner will have to find her own way to face the challenges -hers and the country’s- that lie ahead. Like no one else in the whole post-revolutionary era, she will face the enormous challenge of building at least a minimum scaffolding to be able to govern, given that the previously existing structures -those conceived since Plutarco Elías Calles and those that were forged for a democratic era in the last decades- have been worn out and are already inoperative, if not counterproductive. Governing her own party -an entity without structures that only its founder could articulate- will be a major challenge, and that is if the outgoing president does not try to hinder it. The so-called country of institutions runs the risk of fragmenting under the shadow of caudillos, regional leaders, and organized crime, all of this in the middle of the 21st century with an economy that lives and functions exclusively thanks to a free trade agreement with our complex northern neighbor.
There is a saying, “To every little saint comes his little party.” The “fiestecita” that begins in 2024 entails exceptional opportunities but also enormous internal and external risks. The country has lived five years as if inside a bubble, connected to the rest of the world but pretending that it is independent and can isolate itself without major consequences. The new president will soon find that the viability of the main engine of growth of the Mexican economy is at risk and that the call to account for omissions and acts contrary to the letter and spirit of NAFTA will come sooner rather than later. At that moment, Mexicans will know what kind of president we have and her capacity to face these challenges.
In the British, but also the PRI sense, “the king is dead; long live the queen.” All citizens must tuck her in because she will require all the national support that, as citizens, we must trust, will be reciprocated with civility and without polarization.
*Alejandro Moreno’s figures in the aforementioned survey.
Paradoxical how in the end they come together. Peña Nieto’s big mistake was not his corruption, however flagrant that was, but his political incompetence. AMLO, the great politician who took advantage of the shortcomings and clumsiness of his predecessor to reach the presidency, never understood what will ultimately defeat him. There, in their mutual arrogance, in their contempt for the citizenry -which did not exist in the world of the sixties or seventies, respectively, in which each of these characters inhabit-, the two presidencies merge. And the consequences will not be entirely different.
Two governments of the old regime in the 21st century will now be replaced by a new generation that will, hopefully, break away from the old ways to project Mexico towards the future.
Peña came to the presidency certain that all his predecessors were incompetent. How was it possible, he surely wondered, that, with so many resources at the disposal of the all-powerful Mexican presidency, the presidents that preceded him had not been able to get the necessary and urgent legislation approved? Beyond the veracity or accuracy of this speculation, there is not the slightest doubt that he undertook to carry out the most ambitious alteration to the constitutional framework since 1917.
All the students who went through the free textbooks of the PRI regime learned that there were three sacrosanct constitutional articles: the third, referring to education; the 27th, referring to the ownership of the resources in the subsoil; and the 123rd, referring to labor and union rights. Although there had been various reforms to these articles over the decades, none compare in ambition and depth to those undertaken by the Peña administration.
What Peña did not understand was that the Mexico of the 21st century required explaining and convincing a skeptical citizenry, that the problem was not merely the constitutional text but the legitimacy among the population of his bills for the progress of the country. Failing to carry out that political task cost him, and the country, a series of good laws that, should they survive AMLO’s final onslaught, will now depend upon the politicized judiciary that emerges. He used an obscure mechanism, the Pact for Mexico, to negotiate in the proverbial smoke-filled room the content of his bills, to later have them approved without any discussion (and with a lot of grease…) in the legislature. The urgent thing was to change the constitutional text, as if what was important, in a country that has seen hundreds of constitutional amendments come and go, was the written word.
The mechanism was pre-modern because it did not correspond to the 21st century world in which Mexico exists today. Certainly, Mexican politics are far from being 100% democratic: according to the polls, only 58% of the people assume themselves as citizens, but their level of information, willingness to debate, and demand to participate in public decisions bears no resemblance to what happened in the 20th century. Only a president rooted in another moment in history, presumably the era of glory of the PRI (the 1960s), could have thought that the problem was “technical,” of merely redrafting the constitutional text.
AMLO is guilty of exactly the same fervor: he wanted to change everything, but, in contrast with Peña, without the technical capacity or slightest concern for end result, so that his achievements are even more modest, but much more pernicious, especially in this, the last month of his administration. Another inhabitant of the 20th century, but of the seventies, AMLO arrived with a mission like that of his predecessor, but in the opposite direction. With a similar zeal and arrogance, as well as ignorance, he devoted himself to eliminating all legislation that hindered his vision of the world: he canceled institutions, eviscerated all counterweights, and did everything possible to recreate his idyllic world of the seventies in which the presidency was almighty. The urgency to modify the legal framework in the last stretch of his presidency leaves a poisoned gift to his successor.
Peña’s mistake was not to socialize the bills that he sent to the legislature, as Salinas had done with such diligence (and success) with NAFTA. Neither he nor his team understood the political significance of the changes that they had promoted, nor did they understand the moment in Mexico or the imperative need to explain and convince the public of the relevance of their initiatives. With absolute arrogance they imposed their vision of the world without worrying about the consequences: without paying attention to the obvious fact that what is easy to approve is also easy to reverse.
AMLO has been a specialist in reversing. De facto and de jure, in reality and on paper, he has dedicated himself to canceling the entire legal and political framework that his predecessors had been building to limit the powers of the presidency and to institutionalize the Mexican government, that is, to build the scaffolding towards an eventual rule of law. Using the powers of the presidency, and AMLO’s extraordinary personal accumulation of power, he imposed his preferences in law, opening the door for a new era of uncertainty and precariousness. Or worse.
The ways followed by Peña and by AMLO are different, but the consequences will be similar. One tried to build towards the future, the other has tried to rebuild the past, but both will see their future disrupted because the Mexico of the 21st century cannot bear that level of irresponsibility, a product of the excess power that the person of the president concentrates and the resources that, although from the Treasury, they have used as if they were their own.
Tough years lie ahead, beginning with the inexorable need to restore harmony, in order to once again restart laying down reliable and credible foundations of institutional solidity.
In the vortex produced by the violence, the deaths, the polarization of the insecurity on the part of the President and this year’s elections, and as recent events in Culiacan show, all sense was lost of reality and of the dimension of the problem of public security that Mexico is undergoing. Ideas and proposals come and go -usually fewer ideas and more dogmas- but the common denominator is a total ignorance and simplification among functionaries and candidates concerning the nature of the problematic. Without a precise definition of the origin, evolution and impact on the population -and on economic life- it is impossible to conceive of a strategy prone to advancing toward a sustainable stadium of security.
These are observations and learnings of the matter derived from the past several decades:
· The security of the era of the “old” regime functioned due to the extraordinary concentration of power that characterized the presidency—PRI binomial and that, by means of its structures, exhibited the capacity to preserve peace and order in the majority of the national territory, while the narcotraffikers, fundamentally Colombians whose main interest in Mexico was the transit of drugs from the south to the north. The relevant point is that security was being maintained thanks to the extraordinary political control of that era and not due to the existence of a functional security system. That is, there is really no place to go back to.
· Three factors undermined that schema that for many is a reason for longing, beginning for the president himself: the first and most important of these factors was that the country stopped being a small nation, relatively poorly populated, an inward-looking economy where unions and businesses were controlled through permit requirements. That is to say, the capacity of control and imposition was vast. The growth of the economy, urbanization, the rise of the middle class and dispersion and diversification of the population gave rise to expanding cracks and fractures in the idyllic world of that age.
· The second of these factors was the liberalization of the economy, a circumstance that implied the rapid erosion of the mechanisms of political control exercised by the government and the party. Fewer controls and increasing demands for democratization, all of the latter within the context of the increasing North American integration through NAFTA, weakened the foundations of the old regime until the arrival of the defeat of the PRI in 2000. With the “divorce” of the presidency and the PRI the set-up of the old system collapsed. What had previously worked, suddenly ceased to operate and nothing was substituted for it. Worse yet, despite that the federal government made enormous transfers of resources to the governors between 2000 and 2006, presumably to develop and strengthen security at the state and local levels, security summarily morphed into the country’s principal anomaly, which intensified, until it became the blight that it is today.
· The third factor was the success of the Colombian government in controlling the drug cartels, which led to the birth of the Mexican mafias that took over the drug market. In contrast with the Colombians, the new mafias boasted local control, which changed the nature of the phenomenon. With the evolution of the drug market, the growing liberalization of marijuana in the United States and the appearance of novel drugs such as fentanyl, organized crime spread to other markets, such as extortion, abduction, protection money and other illicit businesses. In the absence of authority at all levels of government, violence and criminality proliferated.
· Organized crime has replaced the government in ever-burgeoning spaces in the life of the country. The mafias control regions, pacify cities and only resort to violence when confronting rivals or unprepared authorities.
· Criminality and violence ensue at the local (not the federal) level and, nonetheless, and just to provide an example, most budgets entrusted to the judiciary and, in general, to everything related to security and justice is devoted to federal entities. That is, not only is there no conception of how to confront the problem, but instead the little that is done is directed toward spaces in which the problem is not the central one.
The rhetoric in security issues is rich in recriminations, but short on diagnoses, serious proposals and the willingness to act. The governmental tonic is absolute irresponsibility, followed by an invitation to accept “the inevitable.” That is, to normalize the problem and sweep it under the rug, as if it were something lesser in importance and passing in nature. What the country requires is going back to square one: for the federal nature of the country to be reckoned with and for the essence of security to be understood as starting from the bottom to top: from the police officer on the corner, and not the other way around.
In his book The Lawless Roads (1938), Graham Greene describes a land “cursed and full of hate and death.” It might be thought that he was referring to the Mexico of today: although the country has been transformed and has evolved in a thousand ways, the quality of the government remains pathetic.
Now that there is a government waiting to take office, the problem has better begin to be rethought before the train leaves the station, as it did with its predecessors.
Democracy is, like many other things in life, an acquired art that evolves and transforms itself over time. England, perhaps the first democratic nation in the modern sense of the term, began to be constructed with the Magna Carta in 1215. After centuries of piecemeal advance, democracy suddenly burgeoned from the end of WWII.
The most common explanation for the transformations that occurred along the past seventy years, especially in southern Europe and Latin America, was that they took place under the rubric of the so-called “modernization theory.” The concept continued evolving and changing throughout decades, but its guiding principle was that economic growth generates political pressures and those latter can only be contained through the constitution of mechanisms of political participation. Under this conception, the governments -hard and soft, modern or tyrannical, civilian or military- ended up ceding control because they had no other choice. That is, it was the weakness of their structures that led to the building of democratic systems of government.
Dan Slater and Joseph Wong* argue that the process of democratic transition in Asia followed a very different pattern, maybe the reason for the contrast with Latin America in results, especially in the economic sphere. Their approach is particularly interesting for Mexico now that it is undergoing a systematic regression politically as well as economically.
In contrast with the Latin-American region, which has undergone democratization processes nearly always during economic crises, in Asia it was the success of economic development that created circumstances propitious for democracy. The central argument of Slater and Wong is that it was developmental governments (almost all military or associated with these) that chose democracy deliberately and voluntarily not because they would confront risks of radical or revolutionary uprisings but more readily the contrary: because they had the expectation, in fact the certainty, that the change in the governmental system would secure stability and contribute to accelerating economic development. They acted through strength, not through weakness or lack of alternatives.
The authors assert that not only there were alternatives, but that economically successful nations such as China and Singapore have elected not to reform their political structures: “Paradoxically, an authoritarian regime strong enough to thrive is strong enough to retain its authoritarian power in the near term if it so chooses.” This way of seeing things stands the theory of modernization on its head in that it implies that governments and economies are strong and, therefore, capable of deciding the best way to administer themselves, a situation very distinct, historically, from that in Latin America.
But the key factor that characterizes the contention of these authors is that, to attain their successful economic development, nations like Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and other less successful such as Indonesia and Thailand, were building indispensable mechanisms for the functioning of the economy, especially in ambits like the bureaucracy, security and justice. Prior to liberalizing they constructed effective and efficient governments to guarantee the functioning of their economies, deriving from which they procured professional bureaucratic structures with substantive autonomy that would allow them to ignore political pressures to fulfill their respective mandates. Having abandoned practices based on patrimonial principles that would favor loyalty and corruption, “the autocrats in the region liberalized because they had very good reason to expect the incumbent regime’s most important political and economic organizations to endure and even flourish under the newly democratic conditions.”
In Mexico the reforms initiated in the eighties followed the opposite pattern: they comprised a response to the succession of economic crises that put the government against the wall. The reforms were the product of weakness and, far from responding to criteria of economic efficiency, were negotiated to always protect the interests privileged by the reigning political coalition. When the time came to negotiate political reforms, especially in the nineties, the governmental structures were lacking all the elements that the Asians had resolved beforehand, beginning with professional and apolitical bureaucratic structures, an effective judiciary and functional strategies of security. Under this yardstick, Mexico entered the democratic era because there was no alternative (conflict was growing) but without a consolidated economic foundation that would ensure continuity or, in the words of the authors, the expectation that the country would flourish under the new democratic provisos. Optimism outstripped the objective circumstances.
López Obrador dismantled the few remaining vestiges of governmental capacity and worse, now he has demolished the judiciary. Difficult to imagine an optimistic future for his successor. However, regression such as that which Mexico is experiencing today has no reason to be definitive in that, as Indonesia illustrates, pressure from the citizenry can force a government to imitate the successful ones, not the losers. That is the challenge.
*From Development to Democracy: The Transformation of Modern Asia, Princeton
Mexico is not experiencing a change of regime, but rather the reaffirmation of the old one. Consciously or not, the electorate accepted Lopez Obrador’s call and voted massively in favor of the reconstruction of the old regime. It was an epic exercise in mobilization, manipulation, leadership and persuasion that had nothing to do with the real world, but with the reality, at least momentarily, of the daily life of the population. Now the President elect will have to deal with the consequences.
The vote was real: the population voted massively in favor of the party in government and, especially, in favor of the President, who continues to enjoy high popularity ratings and intends to determine the future of the country for the following decades. His electoral strategy, perhaps the only thing that attracted his attention outside of the three infrastructure projects (whose future is uncertain), was successful and his decision to achieve a qualified majority, at any cost, bore fruit. All of which only served to show that the Mexico of the 21st century is increasingly looking very much like the Mexico of the 20th century politically. In other words, as an old Mexican saying would have it, the same cat, but rolled upside down…
At the beginning of President López Obrador’s government, his acolytes insisted that Mexico was experiencing a change of regime. They affirmed this based on the notion that “finally” they were being recognized for a victory that, in their interpretation, they had long deserved. Mexico was reaching democracy, they said, because they had won. Everything else was mere pantomime.
However, as time went on, the President undermined one after another of the institutions, practices and traditions that had characterized the hoped-for democratic transition that took place from the nineties onwards. The supposed new regime increasingly began to look more like the old post-revolutionary system than a consolidated democracy.
Looking back, it is clear that the democratic transition that formally began with the series of electoral reforms beginning in the 1970s, but especially that of 1996, liberalized Mexican politics and, by creating a level playing field, facilitated the defeat of the PRI in 2000, opening a new era for the country. In all the series of negotiations and movements that took place, various institutions were created aimed at formalizing national politics, establishing counterweights to presidential power and, in a word, granting citizens predictability regarding government decisions.
The record of this project is mixed. Some of these institutions turned out to be extraordinarily solid and recognized, others ended up being less effective or more prone to being captured by powerful interests. More than anything, all this assembly was not enough to transform the economy, raise growth rates and consolidate a democratic regime that effectively broke with the old post-revolutionary model. This context allowed President López Obrador to launch an attack to destroy institutions and strengthen himself as President, the most important change that the country has experienced in recent years: from a strong presidency Mexico ended up with a weak State and a hyper-powerful President. In this way, the attempt at a regime change towards democracy that was attempted to be built in the past three decades ends up returning to the most primitive model of Mexican presidentialism in the post-revolutionary era. As in the story by Hans Christian Andersen, López Obrador made it clear that the king was naked, and that the entire institutional built-up was so weak that it could not withstand the presidential onslaught. If it could not resist, it did not serve as a counterweight, thereby demonstrating that the old regime was still, and still is, as alive as ever.
But worse. The new-old regime that the President intends to bequeath to his successor is a weak structure with a powerful President, more reminiscent of the era of post-revolutionary caudillismo than of the most successful years of the PRI in the fifties and sixties. Worse, in that era both Mexico and the world were characterized by essentially inward-looking political and economic systems, where a strong presidency was viable. Today, in the 21st century, the era of digital interconnections, the ubiquity of information and the decentralization of decisions, the claim to control everything is simply absurd. Given the weakness of the government, it does not matter how powerful the leader is: it may violate the law and the rights of people, but it alone cannot make it possible to achieve prosperity.
And that is the challenge that President Sheinbaum will have to deal with: how to govern a country in which there is a person who left the ground mined, a party prone to fragmentation but enormously powerful and a citizenry grateful for the past but extraordinarily demanding of the satisfiers that were promised to them. All this without counterweights, which, if they existed, would limit the President, but also the pressure groups of Morena that will undoubtedly try to extort her.
There is no doubt that the country is experiencing the end of an era, above all of a dream, that of democracy, but not a change of regime. The old regime is still as alive as ever, but now with more capacity to abuse than to build and resolve.
After the victory comes the hangover. A legitimate and unobjectionable triumph that does not alter the structural problem the country is facing -and has been facing since before. The new president will have to decide whether to deal with the political reality that underlies the formal political structure or to let it pass, trusting that the deterioration will be manageable. The first path would open the possibility of governing and perhaps more. The second would sacrifice any possibility of achieving the agenda the electorate endorsed with their vote. Or worse.
The country has evolved systematically throughout the last half-century in its political dimension. Still, it has been the product of circumstances, not of a transition plan like the one in other latitudes. No one expressly and consciously led the political transition; instead, it was done as little as necessary or as much as possible, depending on the point of view of each political actor, to prevent a collapse or to advance a process. In contrast to the economic reforms, which at least in concept followed a coherent logic, in the political sphere, the reforms were responding to social and political demands and, more frequently, to the changing electoral and criminal environment.
The result is the disappearance of the institutional anchors that gave the country decades of stability in the previous century, without consolidating the democratic institutional framework that has been developing since the 1990s and never fully took hold. Consequently, today’s political problems are nothing like those that existed when demands such as those of the 1968 student movement or when the then-three dominant parties approved the landmark electoral reform of 1996.
Here, I will address how the political system has changed in recent decades and, especially, what this process of change has yielded for the moment we live, now with a new government that enjoys enormous legitimacy. The nodal point of the argument is that the president will head a government that possesses all the formal power but not the real power. The latter is not due to the presence of López Obrador but to the lack of an institutional structure to rule, regulate, and control political participation in the broadest sense of the term: the real powers -political, criminal, regional, union, business- that swarm all over the country. A difference of this magnitude between formal and real power should concern the new government and society as a whole. And that circumstance is what distinguishes us from fully democratic countries that can undergo radical changes of government without everything being put in jeopardy.
A logical first question is why this is significant today, i.e., what changed to make the approach relevant at this time? The answer, subject to further elaboration in the following paragraphs, is very simple: President López Obrador, because of his personality and political skill, managed to maintain the appearance of normality even though the country was fragmenting underneath, in full view of everyone. It is doubtful that the new president will enjoy the same privilege: it is much more likely that the cacique, caudillo, and criminal phenomenon will grow and, perhaps, consolidate.
The structural problem can be summarized very simply: the reality of the Mexico of 2024 bears no resemblance to that of the post-revolutionary era; it does not have the institutional mechanisms that characterized the PRI era, nor did it achieve an integral transition to democracy. The stability factor throughout the 20th century was the party founded and structured by Plutarco Elías Calles after the assassination of Álvaro Obregón; it was the party that institutionalized political life, regulated the competition for power, exercised iron control over the different sectors of society and, in general, maintained peace. These circumstances favored the economy’s growth, urbanization, and the emergence of a middle class. At the same time, the nature of that system sowed the seeds of its own eventual destruction: political success alienated the middle class, as seen in the student movement of 1968, and controls over economic activity stifled the economy to the point of requiring reforms that weakened or eliminated that structure of controls. For decades, since 1929, the party -first PNR, then PRM, and then PRI- would be the factor of stability and political continuity above the formal power structures.
The electoral reform of 1996 initiated the transition towards democracy: several institutions were built in the political sphere as well as for the economy and, in general, for social interaction, whose objective was the same as that of Calles, but for a society that had evolved and demanded open political participation. In this context, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation was reformed, and the regulatory agencies (competition, telecommunications, energy, etc.) and the electoral institutions were created: the IFE/INE and the respective Tribunal. Since the nineties, the presidents have respected the institutional framework. Still, President López Obrador, a constant critic of the economic and political reforms, evidenced how fragile they are and, above all, the lack of legitimacy of most of these entities. In no time at all, the president neutralized, eliminated, weakened, or destroyed one by one these bodies. The country was left without institutional structures, but it was not formally noticed mainly because of the president’s personality, whose narrative rhetoric and political skill maintained control of the political processes. Now, in the twilight of his six-year term, the vacuum of institutions will be inevitably present.
This is not a hidden reality: crime, to take the most obvious example, is a product of the lack of institutions dedicated to the population’s security. The inability of the citizenry to obtain justice (the so-called common law) testifies to the lack of a Judicial Power dedicated to the issues that most trouble the citizenry. In more political terms, the murders of candidates and the absence of rules (and the capacity to enforce them) in the electoral and partisan spheres are also palpable examples. The country went from an era of vertical controls imposed from above by an all-powerful Presidency (regularly) through the official party to a costly and complicated institutional framework that did not fulfill its mission and proved not to be able to resist the presidential onslaught, an essential characteristic of any institution. The government that is about to conclude functioned due to the charismatic nature of its leadership, which is extinguished with the six-year term.
The old political system was constituted to deal with cacicazgos, caudillismos, political leaders, and other factors of regional, union, and political power that emerged with the end of the Revolution. One feasible scenario is to return to a similar pattern, with the addition of the criminal factor, which is already the factotum in many regions of the country. In fact, hints of this perspective can already be perceived in the form of the regional control exercised by various criminal groups, in the way regional leaders conduct themselves, and in the emergence of actors that, in fact, dispute power with the formally constituted authorities. It is not excessive to imagine a scenario where what is normal in certain regions begins to take place at the federal level, testing the capacity and willingness of the new president to respond to challenges of this nature.
This structural problem dramatically reduces the capacity to govern, creating a paradox: most of the country is not governed or controlled, but legislation can be processed that reduces or makes it difficult for the citizenry, the raison d’être of the government itself, to function.
The end of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government opens a new stage for the Mexican political system. In the last half-century, Mexico went from a system highly structured around a political party, a complex system of participation and control, to a shallow democracy with weak institutions that have now been significantly eroded, if not destroyed. Thanks to the strength of his personality and political skill, López Obrador maintained the cohesion of Mexican politics in general and of his party in particular, which hid the severe and accelerated political erosion that was occurring behind the scenes. With the succession resolved, the risks and fractures the winner and the country will have to deal with will become evident. The president, who ends his six-year term, planned to concentrate, consolidate, and exercise power, his own, but not for the country’s future.
For this reason, the end of the electoral cycle that elected Claudia Sheinbaum president will not be identical to those of the past. With this election, the country reached a turning point, not because of the result itself or the people involved, but because the process, the background, and the imponderables that were evidenced along the way exposed the political system and showed the fragility of the country, the risks of the government of and by a single person and, above all, the impossibility of continuing along this path. The new victors will not recognize the fragility, but they will soon experience it.
President López Obrador is unrepeatable because of his characteristics and circumstances, as well as because of Mexico’s moment. Therefore, as soon as the next government takes office, the shortcomings will become evident: the lack of structures, institutions, and rules of the game, and the counterpart: the propensity to violence or other means, legal or illegal, to advance particular interests and objectives. All this augurs a new political era, very different from the one that existed decades ago or from the one experienced in this six-year term that is about to end.
This is not the first time the country has faced such a challenge, but the solutions used in the past are no longer possible. Now, in the twilight of the six-year term, the country will have to start dealing with the consequences of the fragility of the institutional structures built in recent decades and the intentional destruction undertaken by the government that is coming to an end.
Under normal conditions, one would have expected a gradual collapse of the political system due to the virtual disappearance of the institutional mechanisms associated with the PRI era and the deterioration that has been experienced as a result of President López Obrador’s onslaught on the recently created institutional framework. And yet, that collapse has not occurred, aside from the deterioration that the citizenry is experiencing in numerous areas (such as those briefly described above, including the health system, education, and the like). My impression, as I have already mentioned, is that this deterioration has not become evident primarily because of the characteristics of the president himself. His personality, particular skills, and way of operating maintained the appearance of control, which is a situation that is unlikely to be kept in the foreseeable future.
The formal structure of the Mexican political system has never corresponded to the reality of power. In the 20th century, there was a Judicial and a Legislative Power; however, the dominance of the Executive was legendary but tempered by the existence of the official party, whose institutional structure favored the replacement of elites and the continuity of power. The structure of political control and institutionality of the PRI was gradually degraded by the normal evolution of society, economic changes, and, over time, the advent of electoral competition in a democratic context. Given this, significant questions remain that only time will elucidate, beginning with the president’s power after the government of his successor begins and the potential emergence of competitive power structures: regional or national caudillos. In other words, the weakness of institutions is gaining new momentum as an issue of paramount importance.
Twenty-eight years after the landmark electoral reform of 1996, the country has advanced in certain aspects but has regressed in many others and, due to the laws (and tactics) promoted by the government in electoral matters (the famous Plan B followed by Plan C), can no longer discount the probability of a further deterioration in both political and security matters. The tremendous electoral achievement -certainty about the process, but not about the outcome- could well be reversed in an attempt to impose an outcome outside the electorate’s will. That reform, a great citizen triumph -perhaps the greatest in our history- could be in its last days.
The great paradox of the present moment lies in the contrast between the enormous power accumulated by the president-elect and her party in the recent elections and the real powers that have grown throughout the country; this should also include Morena itself, an entity not organized as a political party that, in the absence of its leader, could well fragment into groupings challenging the central power. Such a scenario would not be uncommon in any democracy, but given Morena’s unstructured nature, the tendency to split is high. That is to say, it is not evident that the numbers achieved by Morena in the two legislative chambers always work in the president’s favor or that they could not be a source of conflict or threat to her projects.
In the realm of real power, it remains to be seen how the new government and the multiple organizations of organized crime will relate to each other (and the strategy to be adopted), the extent to which the governors accept to submit to the federal government, a matter that is also linked to the real regional powers, including the criminal one; the military and the definition of the President’s choice of the areas in which it should operate; and, no less relevant, the international financial markets, which have already shown a tremendous disruptive capacity, even if it has only been a small sample. Internally, the recent election was won with a vast advantage by the government that is about to be born, but this does not imply that it won with 100 % of the electorate: the opposition may not be very organized, but it represents 40 % of the citizenship and that number, as it happened in 2021, can grow at any time, altering the structure of real power in Mexican society. Ignoring this obvious element could be a big mistake: democracy is fluid, and every triumph, no matter how big, is temporary.
Needless to add, many of these poisoned legacies pale compared to the risks that could result from a mismanagement of the relationship with the United States, on whose economy the welfare of the majority of the population depends. The point is very simple: formal and real power are contrasting, to say the least. The latter should be taken with caution because the country could well experience the paradox mentioned above: an enormous capacity to alter the institutional and legal order internally (i.e., modify the formal structure of the country) but be prevented from functioning at the level of territorial, financial and political reality.
Finally, how the president will deal with her predecessor remains to be defined. In the Mexican political tradition of the 20th century, it was usual for the winner in the (internal) race for the Presidency to show a sense of gratitude and loyalty to his predecessor; none of this prevented the logic of power from prevailing and, as the old politicians say, the winner, in this case, the winner, ended up being his executioner. That said, it is clear that the still President López Obrador is not a typical character. Still, mythical leaders enjoy temporary advantages, which almost always end up being ephemeral in the long term. The consequences of a government with poor results -arrogant and, at the same time, modest in its objectives- will be paid sooner or later, and that will happen when the successor has the conditions to assert her power and her responsibility, which is not shareable.
The challenge for the new president is monumental, and the sources of potential conflict are multiple, with the aggravating factor that many of the actors with real power could imagine her as weak simply because she is a woman. In this context, the absence of institutions entails much more significant risks than what is apparent. The supposed country of institutions runs the risk of fragmenting under the shadow of caudillos, regional leaders, and organized crime, all of this in the middle of the 21st century with an economy that lives and functions only thanks to a free trade agreement with our complex northern neighbor. The president does not have it easy, but if she focuses on building institutions that enjoy broad legitimacy, she will hopefully leave a more transcendent legacy than her predecessor.
Luis Rubio is President of México Evalúa. His most recent book is La nueva disputa sobre el futuro de México (Grijalbo).
The electoral victory last June has emboldened not only the President, but also his successor, now President-elect, and the entire Morena contingent. The happiness of having triumphed, fully justified despite the irregularities committed by the President, is leading to a cascade of actions and decisions that could well end up undermining, if not destroying, the enormous capital that Dr. Sheinbaum has at this moment.
The warnings come from all sides and there is no need to repeat them: banks, ambassadors, presidents, politicians, judges, businessmen, observers and commentators, from different nationalities and political positions, all agree on the risks involved in the changes proposed by the constitutional amendments that are about to be approved. Breaking with all protocol and tradition, but above all the decency and deference that a duly certified President-elect deserves, AMLO acts as if his six-year term were about to begin. The problem for Dr. Sheinbaum is that she will be the one who will have to pay the price.
Despite the resounding victory, Mexico is not in the best moment of its history. To confuse the popular fervor expressed at the polls with the objective circumstances facing the Mexican economy and politics is to lose sight of what constitutes a sustainable platform for governance and development.
“Confidence arrives on foot, but it leaves on horseback” snapped the leader of the euro group to the finance minister of Greece when that nation experienced a major fiscal crisis. The electorate’s embrace is fundamental, but it requires maintenance and the cash transfers, which proved to be so important in the recent election, are only sustainable to the extent that the country preserves its stability and the economy begins to grow at rates significantly higher than those of recent decades outside the exceptional regional development poles. It is worth remembering, and even more so for a leftist government, that more than past votes are required to be able to move forward. Edgar Snow asked Mao what was needed to govern, to which Mao replied: “A people’s army, sufficient food, and the people’s trust in their rulers.” “If I only had one of the three things, which would you prefer?” Snow replied. “I can do without the army. People can tighten their belts for a while. But without their trust, it is not possible to govern.”
That interview took place in 1931, almost a hundred years ago, in a different political, geopolitical, and economic context. Mao did not have to worry about investors or relations with other nations, only about internal stability. Today the situation is radically different. In a hyper-connected, digitalized world, based on extraordinarily complex and sophisticated technologies, starting with semiconductors, on which Mexico’s economic viability depends, governments cannot deviate from the fundamentals, which consist of understanding and establishing, as well as maintaining, the trust of both the population and businessmen and investors, because that is the most important competitive advantage that a nation has today. Losing sight of what is essential -and being willing to risk it to satisfy the vanity of a predecessor who is already on his way out- is playing with fire and putting her own government at enormous risk.
A common mistake that politicians make -examples of which there are countless in the President’s morning press conferences, especially those after the election- is to believe that the world is static, and that the future depends on the will of the ruler. Just by wanting it, the wish is fulfilled. Perhaps that is why the leader of Morena stated, with similar arrogance, that a “great gift” had to be given to the president in the form of the judicial reform. Easy gifts (and with Morena’s legislators that’s all that’s needed) end up being expensive, especially for those who will have to pay for them.
Mexico faces a structural political crisis because it lacks institutions to give it a sense of direction, discipline and political and economic continuity. At some point in its history, the PRI fulfilled that function and, in the most recent decades, the USMCA has been the vehicle that, at least in the economic sphere, has given the country viability. Morena does not have the characteristics or the mechanisms to recreate the function of the PRI and the President-elect does not have the Weberian trait of charismatic authority that characterizes AMLO. Her personality and history require an institutional construction, what Weber called rational legal authority, to be able to govern. The bills that are in the making would destroy that possibility before her administration even begins.
The Spanish politician Borja Semper says it clearly: “We are experiencing the first great hangover from the new world order that has emerged from globalization, a world that is not static and is characterized by constant change… Globalization is a reality full of opportunities and challenges, a creator of wealth, but it still has the Achilles heel of the absence of governance that would allow us to know and correct its excesses. The crisis is one of trust, and trust is one of the fundamental pillars of democracy.”
