Luis Rubio

Kafka, according to the anecdote, should have been Mexico’s local customs and manners author. Perhaps even he would have never imagined the absurdities of Mexicans’ daily lives. In a Patricio Monero cartoon, the schoolmaster queries: “Wouldn’t it have been better to first have the new educative model and afterward the teacher evaluation? The functionary responds: “We’re not in Finland! Here we pave the streets first and then install the sewers”. Examples of this nature, in all ambits of national life, are interminable, but some entail serious consequences.

What is certain is that the presidential campaigns show dramatically different readings of the national reality. The recent debate exposed not only a contrasting conception of the way in which national issues should be addressed, but a shocking inability to recognize the very nature of the problems. Candidates who are preparing themselves to run national affairs have an extraordinary disposition to avoid discussing them. Whether it is corruption or insecurity, the issues of the recent public forum, the candidates showed more interest in reaching the presidential chair than in solving the problems that affect the country.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador insists that all Mexicans are potential criminals and that their nature would only change from having a higher income; for him, honesty is identified with his own person and the solution to national problems will result from his arrival at the National Palace. Ricardo Anaya has built a campaign reminiscent of Fox, suggesting that the evils would be solved merely by evicting the current tenants of Los Pinos, the presidential house. José Antonio Meade has not been able or willing to separate himself from the current administration and his team has been unable to understand the environment in which the presidency is disputed in 2018. Margarita Zavala cannot find her own space, nor does she recognize that coming from the outside is much tougher than when she lived at Los Pinos. Jaime Martinez, “El Bronco,” went out to have fun and be recognized as he is and, undoubtedly, came closest to achieving his goal.

Beyond the anecdotes, the debate created a new political reality. AMLO had a pathetic performance and is now clearly vulnerable: what seemed like a slam dunk is no longer true. José Antonio Meade missed the opportunity to leverage his unique circumstance as a citizen candidate and his exceptional experience and personality to present himself as the natural contender. That role now belongs to Ricardo Anaya who, although he did not manage to deliver a devastating blow, clearly changed the nature of the contest.

The question is now threefold: first, will AMLO redefine his campaign? Second, will Anaya have the capacity to transform himself into a reliable and credible candidate for the presidency? And, third, how will the PRI corner respond: by supporting AMLO or negotiating with Anaya? I do not think there are other relevant questions at this time.

The three questions are crucial because they will determine the dynamics that the electoral process acquires from now on. AMLO will likely continue his campaign as if nothing had happened, but will face questions and queries that until now he was able to easily sideline, and the contradictions inherent to any campaign will be exposed. Anaya faces the challenge of his life, which entails not only presenting himself exactly the opposite of how he is, but it also involves the construction of alliances with those he previously ostracized. For Meade comes the moment of recognition that his reading of the context was wrong and, therefore, the strategy that stemmed from it unviable. His dilemma now -and that of the PRI members, which is not the same- lies in working out the least bad scenario.

The moment also opens an exceptional opportunity for the citizenship and for the political development of the country. For many years, the political class -all political parties and politicians- has enjoyed the dubious privilege of not having to respond to the citizenship thanks to the combination of at least two circumstances: one, the structural one, that the political system has not been open to the competition from outsiders; and the other, that both the NAFTA and migration made it possible to keep the boat afloat without having to bother too much. Neither of these two “anchors” will be sustainable in the future, which will require politicians to be accountable to citizens in a way that was unthinkable before and that, for politicians, continues to be so today.

And this brings me back to the sewers. For four decades, the country has tried to solve its problems through structural reforms that have transformed the economy, while leaving a trail of problems unattended, which is precisely the source of AMLO’s candidacy. Those reforms were and are necessary, but they are not enough: to prosper (which should be the only objective), Mexico requires a fundamental institutional reform, in fact, a new system of government. That is the one front that has not been addressed and that is the origin of poverty in the south, inequality in general and the huge differences in economic performance throughout the country.

The new circumstance opens a huge opportunity. The question is whether there are politicians capable of making it theirs for the benefit of the country’s development and the citizenship.

www.cidac.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

A somber panorama was presented by the parents and relatives of thousands of the disappeared on Reforma Avenue a few weeks ago. An infinity of crosses, on both sides of the avenue, each representing people whose relatives -children, parents, brothers- one day simply did not return. Nobody knows if they were killed by a gang of criminals, whether they were recruited by drug traffickers or stopped by the police. Walking those four long blocks of Reforma reminded me of crimes against humanity in the Second World War, Rwanda, Cambodia, Argentina and others that should never have existed: wars, governments that tortured or the total absence of authority. No event illustrates our reality better than that of those disappearances because that which was responsible did not act or, worse, colluded with the murderers.

The procession was not innocent. The political and, at this moment, electoral charge is more than evident: the easy thing is to blame the administration -the current or the previous one- but the reality is that the country is experiencing an accelerated decrease in government capacity in what really counts, in the raison d’être of the State itself: the protection of citizenship. A demonstration of that nature at this time was obviously designed to discredit the candidates of the PRI and PAN respectively, but that does not change the fact that, as a government, the Mexican has failed the population, and this has gone for longer than one can count.

Everyone is negligent on this one: presidents, governors, mayors and heads of government in Mexico City are equally responsible for their inaction, if not their complicity. One may disagree with the strategy designed by Felipe Calderón (and that, de facto, although reluctantly, Peña Nieto has followed), but no one can fail to recognize its merit in recognizing that a government cannot remain undaunted in the face of the massacre that society suffers. López Obrador criticized the strategy at the time with the arguing that “they should not have hit the wasps nest,” suggesting that passivity -that is, the status quo- is a better way to conduct the affairs of State.

Should he win the elections, AMLO would find a very different scenario than what he has been promising. The reality of crime does not disappear if a government proposes to negotiate with drug traffickers, for two very obvious reasons: first, the underlying problem is not the crime itself, but the lack of government, the absence of authority. The Mexican government has spent decades encroaching itself and evading its most elementary responsibilities: instead of modernizing and reforming in parallel to the demographic, industrial, political and security transformation experienced by the country, the political class -at all levels and political parties- remained undisturbed, as if the obvious deterioration were routine. In this way, Mexico went from a very powerful and centralized political system to a decentralization without structure, resources or responsibilities. Had the government been reformed, there would be no security crisis. Thus, the notion that a new president, by virtue of taking office, changes that reality speaks for itself.

Second, gangs of narcos and criminals are involved in a territorial dispute to the death that ignores and transcends the formal authorities, when it does not corrupt or subjugate them. The government cannot negotiate with the narcos, but it must develop the capacity to impose rules and limits as narrow as it has the capacity to enforce them.

The case of Ayotzinapa is very revealing. There the local authority was in collusion with the narcos and was clearly responsible for what happened. The only reason why the government of President Peña ended up being held accountable was because of its arrogance: pretending to control everything made it responsible for everything.

The extent of the impunity that characterizes the country can be observed in the fact of the disappeared. It is easy to blame criminals, tax evaders or simulators of this or that criminal act, but the real absentee is the government, whose authority vanished when it stopped performing its most elementary functions, beginning with that of protecting the citizenry.

When the next government takes office, it will have to find a way to respond to the citizenship, because if something is clear from the current electoral process, it’s that Mexicans have exceeded their tolerance for corruption and impunity.

One day, walking in a huge urban artery in Seoul, I observed the measure of authority: the avenue, with eight lanes, was full of trucks, cars and motorcycles moving at full speed, generating a great bustle. Suddenly, coming out of a little single-lane street, I saw a boy of no more than four or five years old springing out on his bicycle to cross the avenue without stopping or turning around. The green light gave him the right of way and he did not hesitate. His parents evidently trust the authority and allow the child to cross without restraint.

There was the authority, not in the form of a person, but in the rules of the game that all those trucks fulfill in a strict and absolute way. That’s a government that works and fulfills its duty. The day Mexico gets to that, impunity will have disappeared.

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@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

All the evaluations of the problems of the Mexican economy usually include: lack of credit, industrial plant competitiveness and the competition from (mostly Chinese) imports. Each of these symptoms possesses its own dynamic and structure of causality; what the three have in common is that, at heart, it’s the same problem.

First off, credit. A permanent perennial complaint of business, and not a few politicians, is that referring to the Mexican economy’s relatively low level of banking penetration and, above all, the participation of credit as a percentage of the GDP. Participation of the Mexican banking system in the economy is less than in other similar economies but there are reasons that explain the difference. In Brazil, the total credit amount given to persons and businesses represented approximately 60% of the GDP in 2012, compared with 27% in Mexico. Of this 60% in Brazil, the BNDES development bank represented 21% of the GDP, that is, one third of the total credit. Taken as a whole, everything would indicate that one explanation of Mexico’s growth problems derives from the absence of credit.

More careful analysis reveals transcendent factors. On the one hand, in contrast with private banks, BNDES has taken enormous credit risks and has assumed huge liabilities of private companies. Many analysts anticipate that much of its portfolio will end up on the list of bad debts. Time will tell. With this, the numbers that are indeed comparable are 49 vs. 27, that is, a difference of 22 percentage points, not few, and that perhaps is basically explained by the nineties’ banking crisis in Mexico, which generated a financial culture much less risk-tolerant than that which formerly existed. But there is another factor that is much more revealing: the issuance of credit to both large companies and consumers is similar to the Brazilian numbers. The great difference resides in the small and medium industrial sector, where credit is all but not extended in Mexico.

The productive plant’s low competitiveness is perhaps where the main problem of national industry resides. If one listens to the sector’s businessmen, the explanation alludes to a matter of credit, the absence of support and protection on the part of the government, the informal economy and smuggling, that is, the third factor. The credit issue is real but circular: there is no credit because companies are not competitive and they are not competitive because there is no credit. The banks affirm, rightly so from my perspective, that it is not possible to extend credit to enterprises lacking a viable and competitive investment project, one likely to make these companies successful in a globalized economy. The demand for protection in the form of subsidies and tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade (a demand ever more successful in this administration) confirms what the banks say: that these companies are trying to stay alive not through their ability to produce good products at fair prices that the market demands but rather by means of protection granted to them by the government with respect to their competitors. Increasing credit through Mexico’s development bank NAFINSA would not address this problem.

In its essence, the country’s industrial problem is a mismatch between theory and reality. Up to the eighties, the structure of the Mexican economy was not very distinct from that of the Brazilian one. The development model adopted after WWII was oriented toward promoting industrial growth by means of subsidies and protection from imports. The objective was to achieve the growth of a powerful local industry through import substitution. The model favored the producer over the consumer and ended up creating a negligibly competitive industry that typically produced high-priced, low-quality goods. In the eighties, the Mexican government opted for trade liberalization with the objective of heightening the competitiveness of the economy and, through that, improving the quality and price of the goods it produced, but above all facilitating a rapid growth in overall productivity that would translate into better and higher paying jobs.

Behind the decision to liberalize lies a well known principle among scholars of the economy: that of the comparative advantage. On one occasion, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam asked the economists’ dean of his era, Paul Samuelson, whether there were an economic principle that was, concurrently, universal and not evidently true. Samuelson immediately responded with David Ricardo’s principle of the comparative advantage, developed in 1817. Under this principle, what’s important for an economy is not its absolute capacity and ability to produce goods, but its relative capacity and ability with respect to others.

Although a country produces many things, each economy is more efficient in the production of some goods than others. Under this premise, international commerce leads a country to specialize in some type of goods that it also will export, while it imports others in which it is less efficient, thus achieving a greater level of well-being. The principle is well established and there is no doubt of its functioning. The problem is how to apply it in an economy operating under the premise of the virtual inexistence of international trade, our case until the eighties.

According to the economic theory, on liberalizing the Mexican economy, the country would have specialized in a certain type of goods (such as electronics, automobiles, engines, aviation fruits and vegetables, meat, etc., that is, all of the sectors in which Mexico is brutally competitive as an exporter) and would have abandoned other sectors in which it does not possess comparative advantages and that only existed as the result of the protection and subsidy strategy of before. Some of this did occur, which explains the disappearance of many enterprises in sectors such as toys and textiles but, thanks to the persistence of direct and indirect protection mechanisms, many companies that normally would have had to transform themselves or perish are still functioning. A few benefit at the cost of a general lesser growth of the economy.

The country is facing a dilemma that has not been resolved since the moment trade was liberalized, nearly thirty years ago: entering full speed ahead toward the construction of a modern productive plant or persisting in the protection of one sector that, as such, has no future. It can persist, but the cost is growing and can be measured in the form of bad and poorly paid jobs, low levels of economic growth and, above all, minimally productive jobs that inevitably pay the poor salaries.

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@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

This election is becoming clearer every day: the dispute, not in a rational but in a subliminal sense, is about two worlds, two perspectives on life and the role of government in development. Rather, it is about arrogance versus redemption. A large part of the citizenry is simply fed up with the status quo: insecurity, governmental arrogance, corruption, unfulfilled promises and the clash between political discourse (of all parties and candidates) and the harsh reality of everyday life. Against that, the offer of all candidates except one sounds frivolous, if not banal. There is no doubt that the vision implicit in that (mainstream) offer -of whichever candidate one prefers- is the one that Mexico needs, but to the average voter sounds false because it has been the same for decades.

The success of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the polls is due to the fact that he offers something radically different: a return to a quiet life where there is no more promise than that of redemption. As with Trump, he has managed to penetrate the subconscious of the citizenship because he does not operate in the real world but in that of the despondency that legitimately characterizes a good part of the citizenry. When those of us who pretend to live in the 21st century see him not answer questions, evade relevant matters or promise absurd things, we congratulate ourselves that he lives in another world and that, therefore, no one in his right mind would vote for him. But today’s numbers say something different: his messianic discourse has a redeeming effect and therein lies the reason for his success.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has a great sense of himself and of his ability to, by his mere presence, transform reality. Under normal conditions -that is, in a context of social peace, economic progress and reasonable optimism about the future- his message and public presence would have no chance of prospering: everyone would see the absurdity of his proposal and, particularly, its lack of reality. But, as with Trump, a significant portion of the population sees it as a means, an instrument, to stick it to those who have been promising solutions for decades without resolving anything.

Lopez Obrador’s offer clashes with objective reality, but nobody cares about that because people are fed up and profoundly angry, so that anything different from the status quo seems better to many voters “on foot”. Whoever wants to see the numbers will recognize the enormous advances in quality of life, longevity, health, consumption and many other objective indicators, that has taken place but none of this is relevant when the electorate feels offended by the arrogance of the government, something not new, but incomparably superior in the current administration. Previous governments at least understood that Mexicans were anxious for improvement and thus devoted their rhetoric to mitigate their annoyance; the current one is so full of itself that it does not even have the capacity, let alone the humility, to understand that its attitude is the main source of the problem.

What sensible politician in the world would come up with a media campaign focused on complaining about the citizens? That is precisely what the current government has been doing throughout its term, first with its “stop complaining” campaign and now with a new one that says exactly the same: “let’s do the numbers.” With that obvious arrogance and indifference regarding the people’s sentiment, it is not difficult to understand the position AMLO holds in the polls. His mere presence says something different.

AMLO lives in a different world from the rest of the Mexicans. His programmatic proposal is a-historical and dangerous insofar as it consciously ignores the world of today; his opposition to the new Mexico City airport is revealing and, indeed, very similar to Trump’s wall, that is, it is a symbol. It is not that the saturation of the current airport isn’t obvious, but that, as with AMLO’s “to hell with your institutions,” his position on the airport constitutes an affront against those whom he has disqualified as  the arrogant ones who promise but do not deliver and become rich at the expense of the rest. The position, and the strategy that lies behind, is impeccable.

It is significant that AMLO never refers to the citizenship because, in his vision, it does not exist. He embodies the “people” because only he understands it and represents it, ergo, his mere presence ends with corruption and the “mafia of power.” In his world, checks and balances are bad (and unnecessary), institutions serve as a means for the president to impose his vision and the almighty ruler is the only one who can decide. In other words, the essence of AMLO’s project lies in ending individual freedom, the market system, trade agreements, the independent press and social organizations (business, trade union, civil) because they all limit, in greater or lesser extent, the president’s ability to act as he pleases.

AMLO touches a very sensitive fiber that can only be countered with a truly transformative proposal, one that starts from the principle that the political status quo must be changed because that is where the obstacle to the development of the country lies. As long as that does not exist, the redemptive discourse will continue to be successful.

www.cidac.org

@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

Mexico has been fighting for the future for at least half a century. After decades of stability and relatively high economic growth, in the 1960s the economic order based on the substitution of imports and the political order based on the tight control by a closed political system began to crumble. From then on, the country has divided into two main currents: the one that sought to build a new future by looking forward and outward; and the one that persecuted to return to the revolutionary nationalism originated in the Mexican Revolution, particularly in its cardenista phase.

The way in which the dispute was resolved, after the economic crises of the 1970’s, was typically Mexican: with a hybrid of past and future: building new economic strategies but without abandoning the old political structures. No one should be surprised that this contradictory combination is making water right now.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a faithful representative of the revolutionary nationalist current and is exploiting the errors, but especially the shortcomings and inadequacies, of the modernizing current. These shortcomings and inadequacies -in an environment of openness, ubiquitous information and social networks capable of transmitting any message in nano seconds- make it possible to highlight the corruption, privileges and excesses of the old system that, due to this unfinished modernization, persist in Mexican society. It is obvious that all those forms of abuse existed before and, without a doubt, they would continue under an AMLO government, but that is not the point of this contest; what exists is something unbearable for the citizenry and that is the heart of AMLO’s strategy: to show the shortcomings by promising nirvana that, everyone knows, is a utopia.

Although the modernizing currents have dominated the economic and political landscape for these decades, the dispute never disappeared. And that is the core reason why the NAFTA was conceived: to guarantee the viability of the process of modernization, at least in a part of national life, that of investment. That is to say, from the beginning, the modernizers understood, at least in a pragmatic way, the existence of a flagrant contradiction but, instead of solving it once and for all, they built a mechanism that was implacable to protect at least the heart of modernity: the economy. So strong was the PRI political framework that the two PAN governments did not take a hair out of the cat.

The NAFTA resolved the crux of the problem by depoliticizing an enormous chunk of public activity, since its essence lies in the fact that it constitutes, for all practical purposes, a space of exception: there are rules, functional mechanisms to resolve disputes and enforce contracts. With the NAFTA, a fundamental part of the economy was shielded from corruption and isolated from the broader political dispute. However, for the losers in that dispute, the NAFTA became the factor to defeat; their problem was that the trade pact became extraordinarily popular because its virtues are obvious to the citizenry: it is the only relevant engine of growth of the economy and, more importantly, although for the majority it is something distant, it constitutes a vivid example of what the rule of law is.

When AMLO calls “PRIAN” the modernizing governments of the PRI and the PAN, he obviously does so to disqualify them but, in reality, he’s addressing the struggle between the past and the future: openness versus autarky; market vs. government in charge; democracy vs. vertical control. It is not that the governments of the PRI and the PAN have been a paragon of virtues, since they all spoke of modernity but they continued to preserve the world of privileges. But what is relevant is that the common denominator is the PRI system of yesteryear in its political aspect: that which, however much free elections, has not changed in the essential.

The old-new dispute lies at the heart of the old PRI system of which Lopez Obrador and Peña Nieto are equally paradigmatic: both are worthy representatives of the PRI of the sixties and none promises anything other than preserving that old system in its political aspect; where today’s candidates -AMLO and Meade (or Ricardo Anaya)- differ radically is in the economic aspect: one wants to return to the idyllic world of the sixties, just when it was beginning to crumble; the other wants to move towards modernity creating greater development opportunities that are, in the end, those that have stabilized the economy and created a growing and booming middle class.

Contrary to what AMLO proposes, the real challenge of Mexico lies not in the economic “model” but in the old political order, because that is where the country has stuck, preserving a world of privileges and crony capitalism. Thus, the dilemma for the citizenship lies in deciding how to change: forward or backward.

It is worth remembering the wise words of Vaclav Havel: “a better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.”

www.cidac.org

@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

Emotions are an inherent component in human nature, thus in electoral processes. When we say that a candidate “connects” with his audience we mean that he or she achieved establishing empathy with the latter that is, they captivate their public, convincing them to favor the candidate’s perspective of things. Psychological studies conducted on current surveys suggest that this election will be resolved within the fear vs. anger axis: anger against the status quo in the face of fear of losing what has been achieved or what a person has achieved during their lifetime.

The anger that arises against the status quo derives from the evidence of corruption, a system of self-absorbed government and a total disconnect between the citizenry and its governors. Clearly, the Mexican political system, born in the first decades of the past century, was not created to function in the era of social networks, which give free rein to the expression of grievances, only in turn to confront a closed and, in great measure impermeable government. The problem is the system, the starting point from which all political parties and candidates participate (today and always), thus the notion that a person can solve all of the problems with a magic wand, is as absurd as that of supposing that our problems are simple –instead of structural- and can be worked out by the determination of a single individual.

Fear derives from the enormous changes that the country has undergone in the last decades and that have engendered a platform of opportunities inconceivable some years ago. Having a home of one’s own, access to a vast diversity of consumer products of increasingly better quality and an institutional grid that, with all of its avatars and imperfections, allows to elect (rather than impose) those who govern us, all of which are not minor achievements that could be forfeited with a destructive politico-economic project. The risk of losing what has been attained is not a lesser one and explains the reticence of a wide-ranging percentage of the electorate on agreeing to be navigated by the call of the Sirens.

Some decades ago, Bertrand Russell –British philosopher and mathematician, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, who was distinguished by his opposition to nuclear arms and the Vietnam War- wrote about the paradox of the elections in his country: a person is fed up with the Conservative Party and so elects the Labor Party, only to find that the things important to them do not change, therefore going back to vote conservative and so on successively.  What Russell described at that time is not very distinct from what we have at present in Mexico: what is wrong is that the system of government is not suited to the current reality and does not possess the characteristics necessary to be able to operate in the XXI century. The key question for our upcoming presidential election is: which is the best, or the most likely, way to produce a political transformation that makes possible the social and economic renaissance the electorate plainly craves.

On one of his recent books,Francis Fukuyama describes to perfection the nature of our problem. Without referring to Mexico, he says that that there are three key components for the successful functioning of a country: a strong State, the Rule of Law and accountability. No country can be in running order if the government is weak and dysfunctional: to flourish, every nation requires a system of government capable of satisfying basic but crucial tasks, such as security, justice, a legal system and a regulatory framework for the working of the economy. While all three are indispensable, continues Fukuyama, order-of-appearance is fundamental: nations that were democratized prior to their having built the capacity to govern effectively ended up failing because democracy, though imperfect, exacerbates hardships and deprivations, eroding to an even greater degree the capacity to govern, the exercise of its authority and the channeling of demands emanating from the population.

It would be difficult to chance upon a better diagnosis than this of the problematic Mexico faces as a country because it reveals a challenge Mexicans have before them and that radically differs from the proposals the citizens hear in the present electoral contest. The citizenry is right to be angry with a system that not only does not favor the country’s development, but one that thwarts it with its structures of privilege and of contempt for what affects its daily life. Likewise, the fear of outstripping what has been gained should strike fear in the heart of anyone because it is not inconsequential: it should be enough to observe other nations in our midst in order to recognize that, first, there have been important advances and, second, that we could be infinitely worse off.

The problems we face should not only be solved, but it is entirely within the realm of feasibility to do so. The key lies in recognizing that Mexicans must continue to forge ahead with a project that constructs the country’s next stage of development, which can be no other than beginning with a profound reform of the power structures, something certainly impossible were we to return to a former stage that collapsed because it did not work and that produced the chaos that today justifiably begets such anger.

www.cidac.org

@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

With the Morena-Social Encounter Party Alliance in Mexico the 2018 elections took on a new twist. Whether due to conviction or strategic decision, merging an ostensibly leftist party with one that is clearly conservative unleashed great controversy: Is this a marriage of convenience or an association of two ideologically similar entities?  Whichever the case may be, there is no doubt about religion playing a role in this election.

In recent years, one electoral process after another -from Brexit to Trump and including various governorships in Mexico- has evidenced a disconnect between politics and   development. Some attribute this phenomenon to an emotional element, others to the lack of results on the part of traditional politicians, but the relevant fact is that Mexicans are now living in uncharted times: the vectors that served in the past to understand the voters’ way of acting have ceased being valid, as illustrated by failed surveys in nearly all recent instances worldwide. Voters are no longer predictable or, at least, the instruments that would forecast the results are not as useful as they once were.

Of course, all politicians engage in all types of efforts to exploit the emotions of the electorate, because that is the time-honored way to inject the voter with enthusiasm and generate followers of the person or the project that promotes a determined candidate. Religion, at least in a political sense, is no more than another emotion and, from this perspective, it would not be strange for it to become a novel factor in the national spectrum. However, a follower, however faithful, is not the same as a believer:  the former supposes a conscious decision, the latter a conviction that is the product of a belief; both are respectable but bring about very different political consequences.

A documentary on César Chávez, leader of Mexican farmworkers in the U.S., whom I had the opportunity of observing a little while ago, prompted me to reflect on the religious component. Chávez began his movement against the current not only because it was about foreign workers, but also because there was not a sole recognized rural farmworkers’ union in that country. It was not simple to mobilize workers who felt vulnerable in the face of being deported from the U.S. and against the opposition of the employers.  However, Chávez not only achieved recognition, but this also took place in a peculiar manner: one Good Friday he was offered the possibility of an interview in the Nation’s capital and confirmation of the recognition was issued on Easter Sunday. For union members, these two factors were providential signs.

Chávez was not a religious leader in any sense, nor is Andrés López Obrador. Whatever the religious convictions of either are or had been, both are innate politicians who pursue an objective and employ all means possible to attain it. Viewed in this way, the entire conception of the Morena Party and its association with the Social Encounter Party respond to an attempt to inspire a religious feeling and fervor that exceeds any other argumentation in the decision of whom to vote for. That is, the quest is for believers, not citizens.

In a strictly pragmatic sense, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with plying the use of religious symbols for accomplishing a political aim; at the end of the day, in these times, few facets of political competition so flagrantly disregard any ethical considerations whatsoever with respect to means and ends: we have come to the point that anything goes as long as the objective is met; there is one winner and all the rest lose. Some do this with religion, others with gifts and some with the outright buying of votes.

What’s crucial with an election –at any time, in any country- is that a government be chosen so that it should govern: it is not a beauty contest but instead a political decision entailing consequences for the voters themselves.  When the electoral mechanics are geared to removing citizens’ capacities in order to to generate disciples and believers -thus, mobilizing by factors distinct from those of a rational decision – the resulting government ends up having attributions and powers that are contrary to the essence of a democracy because it lacks checks and balances, hence becoming a potential source of impunity, which is the natural breeding ground for an authoritarian government capable of imposing its preferences without any counterweight. Not very different from the past, albeit more extreme.

Each candidate uses symbols -religious or ideological (such as nationalism)- as a strategy to advance their cause; the old political system achieved an ideological hegemony for decades. The novelty, which is worrying, of Andrés Manuel López Obrador´s thrust is his search for believers to follow him to the gallows if that is what the leader demands. This is what explains his reluctance to explain his project or to answer absolutely legitimate and logical inquiries.

The key question ends up being whether the citizens have the capacity and disposition to defend their rights and achievements with the candidate of their preference without opening the door to full impunity, implicit in the believer that accepts anything without a fight.

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@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

In his extraordinary book on Quetzalcoatl -the Aztecs’ Plumed Serpent- and the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jacques Lafaye affirms that all Mexicans are Guadalupanos, even the Atheists. One can almost add to this that all Mexicans are PRIsts, even the PANists.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the origin of practically all of the political history of modern Mexico. It came into being in 1929 to incorporate the entire politically active society of the epoch in order to channel their demands and to control it, as well as to convert it into a mechanism for the transmission of information and political participation. At the time of its creation, after the feat of the Mexican Revolution, the leaderships of all types of organizations, political parties, unions and militias and, some years afterward, the organizations themselves came on board. The institutionalization of Mexican politics arose within the PRI.

Basically all political activity in the country from that moment on took place within the fold of the PRI or in reference to it. Many organizations and political parties were born during the successive years, but (almost) all in coordination with or in opposition to the PRI. The National Action Party (PAN), perhaps the most notable organization in this context, was conceived to oppose the Party of the Mexican Revolution (the PRM), the second PRI predecessor; the historic Left, as it called today -beginning with the Mexican Communist Party (founded in 1919) and others of Trotskyite affiliation- grew in parallel fashion. Later would come the groups that were offshoots of the “official party,” i.e., the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM), the Popular Socialist Party (PPS), those created from the power itself, such as the Labor Party (PT) and many of the key actors in PRD and Morena are of PRI origin. The point is that, in the political history of post-revolutionary Mexico, the PRI (and its predecessors) has not only be been the heart of, but also the reference point of national politics. Although much has changed as a result of alternation of parties in the presidency, the essence endures therein.

From its creation in 1939, the PAN comprised opposition: its history and philosophy were anti-PRIist. Born during the pre-WWII era, it possessed scantily commendable liaisons, hauling the latter along throughout its first decades; however, little by little, it assumed the forms of the European Christian Democrats, becoming the prototypical Center-Right opposition party. The PAN, party of the professionals, contrasted with the PRI’s social base and was always distinguished by its pursuit of ideological purity, ethical values and its rejection of PRI ways of operating.  Over time it became the loyal party in the Duverger concept (in that it did not attempt to overthrow the regime, but rather to defeat it electorally), to the degree of being the socio-legislative key in the first wave of economic and electoral reforms in the eighties and nineties.

All of those attributes turned the PAN into the emblematic opposition party, which earned it the presidential win in 2000. That was no small achievement given the history of the power monopoly that distinguished Mexico, but it was devastating for the PAN itself. Rather than substituting for the PRIist regime, it preserved it, and instead of decidedly advancing its agenda against corruption, nepotism and authoritarian control, it imitated the old system and blended with it. On not changing the institutions and the mechanisms typifying them, the PANists exhibited a similar propensity for corruption to that of its predecessors –to the point of introducing innovations in this fashion with their (in)famous “moches” (cuts)- and were only prominent in their form of governing on exception. After two mediocre presidential terms-in-office, the PAN ended up proving their forerunners’ warning: it procured the power, but lost its reason of being.

The PAN has not recovered from its presidential years; much worse, its leaderships do not recognize, and maybe do not understand, the contradiction that has become their signature: a party dedicated to ethics and the struggle against corruption and abuse cannot continue to present itself as the epitome of pulchritude. It also cannot aspire to the presidency with the same discourse that failed the citizenry on two occasions. It advocates the country’s reform, but it does not reform itself.

Nothing better illustrates the crisis of the PAN than the manner in which its ex-Presidents have turned toward the PRI. Vicente Fox was not profoundly nor particularly PANist: he distinguished himself for his pragmatism but above all for arriving at the presidency (an enormous achievement) to later just sit there. Like Caesar, veni, vini, (but did not) vici: he came, he saw, but he did not conquer. Instead, he did the dead man’s float for six long years of missed opportunities, perhaps the greatest of all of these: the political transition that Mexico is yet to accomplish. However, no sooner did he move out of the Los Pinos presidential residence than he became the First PRIist of the nation: he supports its candidates, lives off its governors and enjoys their benefits, even if he never learned from their political sophistication.

Felipe Calderón comes from the hard PAN and is characterized by his deep anti-PRIism. However, bold as brass, as soon as he saw the end coming, he negotiated with the PRI and, in the best of that party’s style, acts in ways that are functional to it. Circumspect and untrusting by nature, he is in constant conflict with his party, handles his wife’s presidential candidacy and, most likely, as do his acolytes in the Senate, drives bargains in the wings. One of life’s paradoxes: from rancid PAN to pragmatic PRI. Must be seen to be believed.

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Luis Rubio

At what point did Mexico get fucked? Thus begins Conversation in the Cathedral, the novel by Vargas Llosa, wondering about the moment when the decline of his country, Peru, began. Now, by consciously promoting it, it seems that the Mexican government is determined that Mexicans know that this process started at the beginning of 2018. The question is, in the interest of what, at what cost?

In a normal country, the government represents, and owes its function, to the whole citizenry, not only to those of its preference or who voted for it. Its obligation is to carry out its activities within the framework of the law, without abusing its attributions or using State institutions for private purposes. Over more than five years, the government of President Peña has shirked its responsibilities on multiple occasions, has employed biased and dubious resources to evade the law, and justified acts of patent corruption with reasoning and mechanisms conceived so that its officials do not have to pay for their errors or the potential crimes in which they may have incurred. The loss of prestige and unpopularity it enjoys is not the product of chance.

In spite of this, it acts as if he were in full control, as if the institutions of the state functioned impartially and professionally and as if its prestige were in its zenith. A government that does not even pretend to have the monopoly of the use of force -what defines the State- has assumed the mission of persecuting a candidate for the presidency as if it were a matter of national security, as if he were a public plague and not a contestant who, with all his attributes and defects, has the same right as any other citizen to compete for the presidency, provided he does so within the established legal channels.

When even the pretense of civility is abandoned, all that remains is chaos or, as Diderot wrote, “from fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.” And the government seems determined to take that step, without regard for the consequences of its actions, that is, with utter irresponsibility. This is how the beginning of the end starts. The strange thing, although not so much, is that it is the government itself -the supposed guarantor of peace- that is bent on pushing the limits of civility in a country that already lives not only an extreme polarization, but a total absence of legitimacy in government institutions.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon discuss the plight of the people chained in a cave in which the prisoners try to understand the shadows that pass over the wall before them. I resort to the Allegory of the Cave to try to understand the governmental rationale in the way it is acting in the face of a presidential contender which, little by little, it is turning into a martyr.

It seems clear that the strategy lies in creating a sense of fear for any change as a means to preserve what exists. As an electoral strategy, the promotion of a certain emotion constitutes a perfectly legitimate mechanism and all political parties and candidates in the world do so systematically. The issue here is that it is not a political party or candidate that is promoting that emotion, but the government making partisan use of the institutions of justice to advance their own political agenda, as if these were the fifties of the last century. Impossible not to remember Talleyrand’s famous admonition: “they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

They did not learn of the risks of polarization, they did not learn from the consequences of the attempted impeachment of 2005 and they did not learn from what has happened in nations like Venezuela, Zimbabwe and many others that, prodded by the government’s own actions, led to chaos. Once that step is taken, it becomes increasingly difficult to recover the peace and tranquility of the population, making it impossible to govern.

Mexican society is angry and that is precisely the emotion that the government should not be stirring up, because it leads to radical electoral decisions. In this, the contrast with China is paramount: there, the fear of chaos has led the government, over several decades, to accelerate the pace of reforms in order to satisfy the population and avoid chaotic situations. In Mexico, the government itself has entrenched itself, is dynamiting the political stability for which it is responsible and defends itself as if the enemy were the society.

Democracy is less about elections than about how to resolve disputes that arise in society and to make the decisions that are required to build the future. The militant, partisan and biased use of the institutions leads to the destruction of the few institutions that the country has and, worse, when the one who throws the first stone (and the second and the third) is a government so extraordinarily discredited by corruption scandals that are infinitely worse than those than those the aforementioned candidate is accused of.

Certainly, any act of corruption or alleged illegality must be combated, but what President Peña’s government is doing recalls another famous phrase of Talleyrand, the eighteenth-century French statesman: “It is worse than a crime, it is stupid. ”

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@lrubiof

                                                      Luis Rubio

Now that we are full swing, on all flanks, in the process of presidential succession, it is important to reflect on the opportunities and risks that the country is confronting. The external context is not particularly generous: the NAFTA negotiations have not advanced in terse fashion and the upcoming U.S. Congressional primary elections will surely reopen much of the anti-Mexican discourse that has characterized the Trump administration from the time of his campaign. In the domestic ambit, turbulence is ceaseless, all of which inflates the level of conflict in view of the moment when the voters will decide who it is who will govern us.

In addition to this, we are facing real risks concerning which, above the strategies that the candidates themselves and their parties come to employ in matters of the social networks and manipulation of the electorate (all legitimate and increasingly normal in election processes), other interests -internal or external- devote themselves to influencing the proceedings due to reasons extraneous to those of direct interest to the electorate. Today it is clear that there were external interventions in the British elections that decided on the so-called Brexit, in the U.S. elections Trump won, and in the Catalonian referendum. There are no grounds to suppose that Mexico’s case will be distinct; one must not forget that Mexico, like Berlin and Vienna and other strategic places in the Cold War era, were protagonists in the intrigues swirling among the powers.

The question is how the external interact with the internal interests. That is, who benefits from or is damaged by these deceits and collusions. One obvious perspective is whether the interest of the U.S. is the same as that of Trump and, in any case, how this will play out in the elections to come. I am absolutely sure that the U.S. national interest privileges the stability and prosperity of Mexico and that this interest extends beyond the specific candidates. It is not similarly evident to me that Trump’s interest is the same: in his proclivity for advancing a public agenda that many people in the U.S. reject, he can end up propitiating, consciously or not, results that do not coincide with the general interest of his country. From this perspective, I estimate that Trump, to a much greater extent than NAFTA, will comprise an integral part of the Mexican presidential election.

I return now to the opportunities and risks: for many, this election is especially sensitive because what is involved is of enormous magnitude. Part of what explains this appreciation lies in the nature of the reforms undertaken during Peña´s presidency (above all in educative and energy matters), touching upon as they do two or three nodal precepts of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. Another component of the explication resides in the substantial loss of prestige accompanying the exiting president due to the corruption and his dearth of leadership, lending credence to the numbers characterizing López Obrador in the polls.

But the greatest sensitivity does not dwell in the specific factors that denoted the outgoing government, whether the reforms that it promoted or the way in which it conducted the affairs of State, but rather in the immense power that the presidency concentrates. Concentrated power utilized for carrying out positive changes –those driving greater economic growth in the long term, better quality-of-life levels and increased general well-being- should be welcome; but the self-same power employed for destroying and dividing is in the end pernicious under any yardstick. Mexico’s main problem –which may be observed since the invention of the “non-heritable six-year monarchy” in the immortal words of Cosío Villegas- is that one never knows what the next government will do. And that engenders uncertainty and even fear.

In a recent article, Janan Ganesh compared the U.K. with other developed nations. His foremost argument is that England is typified by a system that concentrates the power in the Parliament, allowing it to effect huge reforms but reforms that, at the same time, can be bad, everything depending on the degree of excellence of the Prime Minister at any given moment. That characterization, unusual for a developed country, poses a contrast with the U.S. (where Trump has encountered colossal difficulties in making headway with his agenda due to the solidity of the checks and balances) but also with France, where the immensity of the presidency is curtailed by the commanding mayors and extra-parliamentary powers such as the unions and the bureaucracy.  Ganesh resolves his commentary by remarking that the pathetic state of the U.S. infrastructure, the resistance to change of the French and the scarcity of reforms in Italy mirror infirm central governments that are curbed by strong institutions that protect the citizens above everything else.

In Mexico we lack strong institutions that protect the citizenship and we do not have world-class statesmen capable of bringing the population on board for the sake of integral and evenhanded development. If the candidates endeavor to achieve a stable 2019 they had better begin to respond from now on to the cry for certainty and clarity of course which the citizenry demands and requires.

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