Luis Rubio

Three truths are indisputable:  President López Obrador is unrepeatable; public finances are more vulnerable than they appear; and the election of the Mexico’s next president will have of necessity to be the beginning of a great negotiation for building a new future. Whoever wins, man or woman, of whichever party, the country will find itself in a situation much more delicate and precarious that it would appear today. The mixture of structural factors and situational circumstances will evoke the imperious need to muster the will of groups, political parties and citizens who are at present found on distinct sides of the fence -the real differences and those artificially driven by the present government- that today divide the population.

There are also other things that are evident and that do not merit greater discussion: the National Regeneration Movement (Morena Party) has launched an open process for the nomination of its candidate; the opposition is beginning to show muscle; and the electoral law turns out to be more flexible, and at the same time more complex, than many supposed. Each of the three elements treads on the heels of its own rationality and will generate results that will affect the other two. What a few weeks ago appeared to be a unidirectional process inside Morena has ceased to be obvious, while the potential for a truly competitive race is becoming ever more real.

Despite the incentives that lead the parties of the opposition not to entertain competing for power but looking for federal monies (like the Labor Party (PT) or the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) have always done), reality is railroading them and forcing them to develop a competitive strategy.

Regarding the electoral legislation, there are two contrasting perspectives: on the one hand, the electoral authorities (the National Electoral Institute [INE] and the Electoral Tribunal); and, on the other, the revenues that the political parties receive based on their performance in the previous election. Application of the law has resulted in being more flexible than it seemed to be: the contrast between the severity of the way the previous INE board and the volubility of the present one is evident. It is possible that the law permits that malleability, but it is ironic that it is the ideological current that Morena represents -the principal source of restrictions in electoral matters from the nineties on- the one that exhibits such a flagrant willingness to violate at least the spirit of the law, now with the formal backing of INE.

On the other hand, the President is indeed correct in that there are things in that same legislation that should be changed, although not necessarily those he is demanding, which are incompatible with a democratic regime. The lack of opposition-party dynamism suggests that, when conditions are less contentious, a discussion should ensue on the privileges that the 1996 Electoral Reform conferred on the three main parties, which have become de facto business enterprises rather than institutions dedicated to the aggregation of citizen interests for seeking power.

In black and white, the upcoming government, wheresoever it derives from, will find the coffers empty, with a wholly distorted budget (devoted to clienteles at the cost of health, education and public investment) and in the face of a scenario of polarization that will not cut it much slack. Its circumstances will be easier or more difficult depending on what the outcome of the election itself is: how close it was to winning and how the composition of legislative power ended up. That is where the structural problems, the situational circumstances and the spirits of those responsible will condense. The opportunity to build a new future will be enormous.

I return to the beginning: the President is unrepeatable. Even if his preferred candidate were to triumph, no one in the national scene has AMLO’s history, presence or skill. His personality has achieved not only dominating Mexican political life, but also avoiding that the daily reality, that affecting the citizenry, acquires relevance among the population, something unprecedented. His successor will not enjoy those circumstances, thus necessitating the procurement of a method allowing for governing and for the country to find a brand new bedrock for a better future.

The public finances look good, but their fragility is immense, above all due to the disappearance of the contingency funds, which generates an outlook much more uncertain than apparent.

No one can predict what the future holds or the moment at which the factors would come together that facilitate or render the function of governing difficult. That will be the moment when the great opportunity will present itself, but only if whoever wins has a vision of transcendence and development and if the rest of the political world and the citizenry prove that they can be at the height of the circumstances.

Much of what will have to be negotiated could come to a few percentage points of this or that (taxes, for example), but the moment will also permit establishing the foundations of a novel political arrangement that will transform a government dedicated to control into one devoted to development and well-being, and the political system to turn into an environment of respectful competition between a society that has the means to be well and truthfully informed.

Some will recall the 1977 Moncloa Pacts that engendered the Spanish democracy were about salaries and prices, but they achieved much more. Yes, it is possible.

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Luis Rubio

Step by step, the project of concentration of power is now in its final phase with its consequent economic risks and inevitable destruction of civility. This statement will seem excessive to many, but history shows that when power is concentrated in a single person -and, worse, when this is done through disqualification and alienation- the result is an inexorable impoverishment of the country and, inevitably, of the poorest, those who gave their vote for the President who now betrays them.

The twilight of a government whose central project was the absolute denial of the plurality that characterizes the country begins. The President won with just over half the vote of the population, an exceptional result since the votes began to be counted in an impeccable and professional manner after the creation of the IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) in 1996. Five years later, the situation is different, as the contrasts between the potential candidates to succeed him attest to this. None of them fully represents him and none can bring up the same percentage of votes that López Obrador achieved in 2018. The exclusion of half of the citizenry, in addition to a good part of those who, while not being from Morena, conferred their vote to him, now present themselves in the form of incompatible pre-candidacies.

The president has created a mechanism that aims to avoid ruptures, while adding dissimilar contingents behind a winning candidate. A difficult objective to achieve despite the resounding success he has had in controlling not only the public debate, but especially the narrative that lies behind his leadership and the loyalty that his bases grant him. The President is popular, but his government is unpopular, and no one knows how these two factors will add up or collide on Election Day. The population seems satisfied with the improvement in their real incomes and in the level of employment, but the country continues to lag from when the government was inaugurated. In the UNDP’s human development index, Mexico lost 12 points, equivalent to ten years of previous progress. Here too, it is not obvious how these two factors -the recent improvement or the absolute loss – will impact on the minds of voters on Election Day in 2024.

The opportunity for the opposition, if it manages to ally itself and set up a common front, is more than evident. First of all, the loss of support for the President is real: Morena lost the midterm elections. The opposition does not control the Chamber of Deputies because it did not join in a common front on that election, but that could, and should, change in 2024. The speed with which the ruling party has entered the process of nominating its candidate does not mean that an alternative candidacy is impossible eleven months hence, when the new President will be elected. The notion that the only thing missing for the meal to be ready is for Morena to issue its verdict in the form of a candidacy is clearly false.

The exercise of power wears out all governments and more so when there is so little to offer in the form of tangible results. The government’s key projects remain unfinished, and it is doubtful whether they will have significant impacts on the lives of the population. The contentious nature of the presidential rhetoric pays off, but it is also alienating, and the resulting division translates into fractures that can end up being as consequential as the benefits. When the President imposes himself by demanding that the Congress “not change even a comma” to his legislative bills, he sends a message to his base, but he loses the rest of the citizenry. Not all the population is identical, submissive or docile, and it is not at all unlikely that, as the vote in 2021 illustrated, the President has lost the majority with which he won five years ago.

The attack against the institutional framework, the opposition parties and the emblematic institutions of the political transition undertaken from the nineties, especially entities such as the Supreme Court of Justice, the National Electoral Institute (INE) and the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data (INAI), has been relentless. The objective of submitting and subordinating the people has been express and manifest. But it has not been successful. The relevant question, less than a year from the day of the presidential election, is whether the current government will end up leaving a better country than it found. The hard data says no; the narrative that disputes the data says that the country has a health system like Denmark’s, that insecurity is decreasing, and that corruption has disappeared. Which will win: reality or the illusion? Another imponderable.

The reality is overwhelming and more so when, despite perceptions, there is no project liable to yield better results. Malcolm X, a human rights activist, wrote that “you’re not to be so blind in patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter what it says or does.” The citizenry will have in their hands the opportunity, and the responsibility, to decide what wins: reality or passing perception. The problem is not the government, always temporary, but the impact on the population, always permanent.

Today everything seems clear, but there are many months to go. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson said that a week is a lifetime in politics. Eleven months is an eternity.

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Luis Rubio

All societies develop their myths and beliefs as ways of explaining life, but in Mexico these often fall short of reality. Someone once stated that if Kafka were Mexican, he would have been a narrator of everyday life. In that spirit, here are some observations that, without telling a coherent story, say a lot about this land of fantasy.

• Mexico lives today the paradox of a weak government, but with a hyper powerful president. The government is incapable of managing a health crisis or distributing medicines, but the president can impose his law in the election of a local government. The country’s infrastructure is falling apart, the streets look like a war zone and extortion and violence proliferate in more and more regions, but a train that does not connect productive centers or add value destroys jungles and cenotes by presidential whim without there having been any feasibility assessment.
• The flip side of that same paradox is that the international environment in which Mexico exists, and from which the government has pretended that it can be abstracted without cost or consequence. While the well-being of the population depends to a large extent on exports, the government does everything possible to complicate ties with the exterior, as if one thing were not related to the other. Instead of promoting and facilitating these ties -both in terms of trade negotiations and investment promotion as well as in the creation of infrastructure and facilitation of daily transactions- violations of the trade treaties keep piling up on which the fluidity of trade depends as well as the very viability of our economy. The claim that an electricity generation plant can be expropriated or prevented from operating without having international repercussions is mere wishful thinking.
• Mexico does not have a food or self-sufficiency problem. The agricultural sector is, for the first time in centuries, in surplus and has achieved extraordinary productivity. What Mexico does suffer from, but is seldom addresses directly, is a huge problem of rural poverty. Imposing measures that restrict exports or imports of agricultural products will not solve rural poverty, which is at the heart of the country’s development dilemma. The next government could begin to meditate on the way in which rural poverty can be attacked, since the solution to three of the main challenges facing the country depends on this: social inequality, the quality and focus of education, and social mobility, three aspects of the same problem.
• The recent state elections, in addition to the demonstrations sponsored by the citizenry as well as by the government, respectively, of the past few months, show one of the great contradictions that characterize Mexicans today. Not all Mexicans see themselves as citizens: in a recent survey, only 58% see themselves as such, compared to 42% who see themselves as “people”. In its desire to preserve and nurture the loyalty of the population above any other value or objective, the government has chosen to impede the growth of the economy, because, as the previous president of Morena once said, a poor people will always be loyal, but that sentiment withers as people prosper. Consequently, it is better to bet on permanent poverty.
• But the above does not solve one of the key enigmas: the frequent distance that exists between organized civil society with respect to ordinary Mexicans. No one who has observed the contrasts between the demonstrations organized by the government and those of civil organizations can doubt that there lies not only a contradiction but also an enormous challenge. The very low turnout in the State of Mexico election speaks for itself.
• Nor is it possible to close one’s eyes to the smallness of the Mexican political class, its lack of vision or the inability of the opposition to perform its crucial functions. The opposition leaders, now that their arrogance and incompetence have been exposed in the State of Mexico, cannot deny the obvious: that they have failed to act as the opposition to the institutional destruction led by the president. The citizenry has been losing one counterweight after another, remaining only protected by a harassed Supreme Court. The sum of arrogance, corruption and insignificance has left Mexicans observing how the only objective of the opposition is an embassy…
• When one listens to leaders of countries that really aspire to progress, the contrasts with Mexico become all the more visible -and painful. It is not worth talking about places like Singapore, where the clarity of vision is impressive, but India, a nation infinitely poorer and more complex than Mexico, illustrates what is possible. The vocabulary used by officials as well as businessmen, political and social leaders speaks for itself: investment, productivity, social mobility, trust and predictability. Mexico has everything to adopt a similar catalogue, but worries about the little things always win out.

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -deliberate, contrived and dishonest- but the myth.” This is how Kennedy characterized the indisposition to advance and prosper. It would seem that he was referring to the Mexico of today…

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Luis Rubio

Order and disorder, argues Robert Kaplan,* comprises a dilemma not dependent on the individual, but on their lived experience. It took England 700 years to evolve from the Magna Carta to women’s suffrage, with many exceedingly violent struggles along the way. Democratic traditions, as illustrated by the so-called Arab Spring a little more than a decade ago, cannot be established overnight. Mexicans who lived through the epoch of the seventies’ financial crises entertained a conception of the world very distinct from those born in the era of alternation of political parties in the presidency, something inconceivable in post-Revolutionary history, although seen as a natural occurrence today. Contrasting experiences that explain distinct perspectives concerning the way the current government conducts domestic affairs.

During the past four decades, explains Fernando Escalante,** the country underwent two great evolutions, neither of these successful. The first evolution entailed the passing from the world of legitimate impunity that enjoyed social support because it was effective and yielded results in terms of economic growth and social peace, i.e., governability (but it ended because its viability ran out), to an inconclusive transition based on democratic forms and market mechanisms as a factor of economic organization: “the administrative rationalization of elections and depoliticized markets.” That “transition regime” was successful by many measurements, but was accompanied by undesirable consequences, such as diverse inequalities that were not resolved because an effective system of justice and the Rule of Law were never consolidated. Instead of bringing to a close the world of complicities and impunity in order to construct a foundation of security and justice for all, that regime implemented a centralist vision over a country that was increasingly larger, diverse and disperse and for which solutions from above would not work: rather than strengthening them, they weakened the local authorities and opened the door to the universe of extortion that has become generalized at present.

The second evolution took place recently, but one toward a new era of lack of definition. “To say populism, authoritarianism, the return of the PRI, is to say very little.  Among the facts herein, there lies a blatantly statist rhetoric hand in hand with the weakening of the State… the aspiration to historical transcendence… that contrasts with a disconcerting lack-of-project.” The description that Escalante offers spells out the opacity, the electoral manipulation, and new spaces of intermediation. In sum, the search for the return to the broad margin of impunity that the old political class used to enjoy. The model that the present government has been building brings face to face the formal economy (requiring more State) with the informal (requiring more politics), but responds to contrasting circumstances in distinct regions of the country and societal strata. The implicit contradiction between these two worlds leads to a growing responsibility in the hands of the Army, in parallel with a systematic diminution of the capacities of the State. Escalante concludes his argument in ominous fashion, citing Leonardo Sciascia, stating that this pertains the “order of the mafia.”

Now that Mexicans find themselves in sight of the process of presidential succession, the question is, what is comes next.  However much the President picks up the pace in an attempt to confer formality on his preferences and decisions through a hurried series of legal initiatives, it is reasonable to question whether the present moment is sustainable: that order of the mafia to which   Escalante refers and that, I might add, is sustained more by the skill of the person to keep alive the attention of the population than to the functionality of his government. Could the individual who succeeds the president maintain the status quo?

Order and disorder, two sides of the same coin and two contrasting circumstances, both always present in daily life. Those living in the formal economy cannot avoid numerous encounters with the extortion, impunity and violence with which more and more Mexicans are assaulted; those living in economic informality are up against systematic barriers to their development not only due to the self-same factors of violence and impunity that the entire population endures, but also because of the encumbrances that the formal world imposes upon it in an expansive manner.  The success of the Mexican Tax Administration Service (SAT) in matching invoices with payments to close ever more spaces of tax evasion constitutes an  unassailable barricade for informality, the latter paradoxically the president’s social base.

I return to the beginning: experiences lived over time determine the perspective held by each of us with respect to the present moment. For those who lived through the growth and stability era of stabilizer development, the violence and informality of today result in being intolerable threats to development; contrariwise, for those who grew up in the eras of alternation or political parties in the presidency and violence -two unfortunately inseparable factors- the notion of stable and systematic growth becomes an unachievable chimera.

Whosoever wins, the next president will be unable to circumvent these contrasts: he or she will have to find a way to reconcile them, a new social pact that presses toward the formalization of national life.

*The Tragic Mind; **México ayer y ahora (Nexos, abril 2023).

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 Luis Rubio

Everything was going well when the madness began. The desire to transform had been limited to eliminating obstacles that did not enjoy greater popular recognition and expanding cash transfers to favorite clienteles. Both steps responded to an impeccable logic: if it does not enjoy legitimacy, it can be eliminated at a minimum cost, and the funds derived from this act would make it possible to expand and consolidate the sources of support. Indeed, polls show that the political cost of eliminating entities, institutions and funds, even for such fundamental things as the health sector, has been minimal. Perhaps that led the president to consider that everything is possible and that the only limit is the imagination.

In fact, there are many things that required (and still require) to be modified and that had not been possible to a large extent due to the ability of various interest groups to hinder governmental action: unions, businessmen, politicians. No one can have the slightest doubt that there are immense items of waste in public spending; that bureaucratic inertia inevitably leads to demanding more resources instead of raising productivity and improving results; and that there are various items in the public budget that have the opposite effect to that originally conceived. The way opposition party leaders behave given the federal resources they receive by law is a good example of this, but that is another issue.

Without prior commitments, President López Obrador had everything in his hands to carry out that transformation that he promised but which was later reduced to nothing more than concentrating power and destroying sources of potential counterweight to the presidency. Many of the major impediments to the country’s economic growth and development could have been removed, opening huge opportunities for the future. That didn’t happen. And now the panorama is clouded by measures that allow anticipating increasingly complex and conflictive scenarios for the budding succession process.

The last few weeks have witnessed the willingness to tempt fate, even without acknowledging it. The attacks on the Supreme Court of Justice and especially on the minister president do not cease and are now accompanied by decrees that entail, at least in political terms, a clear spirit of contempt. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Immediately afterwards an expropriation, in this case of the trans-isthmian railway. These two examples constitute a huge escalation with respect to the already sour and aggressive tone of the daily presidential morning rants. And there are still fifteen months to go.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist governments of its satellites, the head of the Hungarian party, Karoly Grosz, coined a lapidary phrase that begins to seem like a prediction of what is to come in Mexico: “The party was shattered not by its opponents but -paradoxically- by the leadership.” Right at the moment in the political cycle when Mexican presidents traditionally tried to consolidate what they had achieved and prepare for the final leg, hoping to avoid the turmoil and potential crises that accompanied many presidential transitions, President López Obrador raises the tone and undertakes a new onslaught on more and more fronts.

The objective is clear: to win the presidential elections at any cost. The obligatory question is obvious: if things are going so well, why so much circus? Or, in plain terms, why run the risk of unleashing forces that could later prove unstoppable at this stage of the game, opening more fronts every minute?

There are two speculative possibilities: one is that there is no such certainty of winning, which would require doubling down. The other is that the ease with which the president has managed to advance his agenda throughout these past five years has led him to consider that anything is feasible and at a low cost. The Japanese thought something like that in World War II and ended up committing hara-kiri.

The problem lies not merely in the unhinging of the traditional limits of Mexican politics (which, by the way, do not have to be immovable), but in the aggressiveness of the strategy just now when the inexorable vulnerabilities of all presidential transitions begin to ascend and, with them, the risks of ending badly. Suicidal instincts seem to have been unleashed.

Ortega y Gasset said that “This is the most serious danger that threatens civilization today: the intervention of the State; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State, that is, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long term sustains, nourishes and drives human destinies.” The path taken in recent days not only takes Mexicans away from civilization to bring the country closer to tyranny, but also leads to potentially critical situations, just the opposite of what has motivated the president since the first day of his term.

If the course is not altered, the country could find itself, in the least of cases, facing a constitutional crisis that could well be exacerbated if the election does not go as the president wishes. Interesting times, as the Chinese would have it.

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Luis Rubio

To dream about achieving Nirvana in record time is always grandiose; to convince voters that this endeavor is possible, within reach, is what politicians do, above all campaigning candidates, all around the globe. If that is seasoned with attractive ideas such as a world without corruption and inequality, the approach would seem to be unbeatable. Politics is precisely that: promote better horizons and bring up the population to procure them.

But decades of great unsatisfied dreams should have convinced Mexicans by now that, without solid strategies and appropriate policies, this grandiosity results is being elusive and, frequently, counterproductive because it alienates voters and radicalizes them. As 2024 approaches, it would be best to start to see things backwards: instead of promising the impossible, future governments should develop the less attractive, the more aberrant, and the more dangerous scenarios, and to then back down from these and initiate a government project likely to transform the country. That is, to understand what it is that one would not wish to happen to make certain that the country will not arrive at that point.

How will Mexico look in 2030, at the end of the next government? Will the inertia have been overcome of a country divided into regions that run (or fall behind) at different velocities, a country that denies opportunities to those most in need and a country that absolves corruption instead of eradicating it? That is, will the foundations have been laid of a sustainable base of concord, peace, certainty and prosperity in which the entire population can participate and count on the conditions that make this possible? Rather than imagining a fantasy world that is often described during electoral campaigns, why not recognize that the current tendencies -nearly all bad- need to be reverted and corrected to end up much better than what exists today?

First, is to recognize the need to break with the dogmas that have paralyzed the country and led it to decades of lost opportunities, as well as to the recent political-economic zig-zag course. All this due to the unwillingness to acknowledge two elemental factors: first, that the country has advanced a great deal in recent decades but, in the same manner, that this advance has not included the entirety of the population nor is it prone to acquiring this in its current state. And second, that it is legitimate for people to be angry, fed up and upset at the lack of opportunities, mostly due to their social, economic and regional origin. Same with poverty, corruption, violence, and inequality, not only on moral grounds, but also in a practical sense: a society that confronts evils such as these is also a nation that knows where it is going and is disposed to get there.

The promises of the reformers (1982-2018) and the transformers (2018-today) -distinct words that are synonymous in practice – have not fulfilled their objective because the country does not have the basic capacities to transform itself nor the commitment of its political leadership to do what’s necessary to attain it. Beyond the vested interests that inhabit the political system and that have been victorious in impeding the success of reforms and transformations, the country does not have a government  likely to lead forward; an adequate educational system to bestow skills, vision and chances for the poorest and least favored populations; a public security system designed from the bottom up (and not the other way around) to consolidate a foundation of peace for the citizenry;  and a network of institutions that guarantee effective counterweights, a legal framework conceived to make possible a modern country that provides certainty and clarity of course. Though there are small examples of favorable results in nearly all these rubrics, the country today lacks the assets necessary to transform itself.

It is more than evident that none of the governments of the last decades ever meditated on the worst-case scenarios that could present, in that practically all the latter ended up yielding appreciably inferior results to those promised and, in some cases, dramatically worse. Their programs, projects and strategies were all conceived in willful fashion: if I will it, it will happen, thus falling into the most elementary of errors, believing that intentions equal results. No government of the last half century is free from that circumstance.

The countries that have truly transformed themselves -in terms of arriving at high income rates per capita,  eliminating (or frankly reducing) poverty and erecting serious, trustworthy and sound institutional scaffolding -that is to say, an environment prone for development and peace- share at least three crucial features: a) the edification of an efficient system of government (almost all following the example of Singapore and its imitators); b) an obsession with economic growth (and their consequent disposition to eliminate obstacles to make this possible); and c) an educational system conceived to transform the population and confer upon it the opportunities that had never before been possible.

It is not the time to dream, but to build that future and 2024 offers an exceptional opportunity to achieve it.

*From the new book ¡En sus marcas! México hacia 2024, Editorial Grijalbo, 2023

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Luis Rubio

In the official version, the only thing left to define the next six years is the name of the Morena candidate (corcholata) awarded the requisite finger tap (dedazo) by the president. If that were so simple, why such intrigue, so many legislative changes, such a barrage of disqualifications and so great an onslaught of verbosity? Were such certainty to figure in the horizon, the rhetoric would be very distinct, above all because many of the myriad cautionary yellow traffic lights along the way are not under presidential control, beginning with the relationship with the United States in all its ambits: the economy (key for Mexico’s exports), the border, security and migration. The official version is logical, but XXI-century Mexico is not that of fifty years ago when the president and his party commandeered nearly complete control of the decisive variables. In this context, is a unitary and competitive opposition candidature possible and viable?

The 2024 election should be understood where the three contrasting realities intersect. One is the universe which the President has been bent on recreating, imitating the old PRI system with its omnipresent presidency and mechanisms of control over and for all. The second reality is the environment where the country is located: an integrated world in which there is a proliferation of information (and disinformation) to which everyone has access and in which commercial, financial and personal exchanges are crucial and permanent for the performance of the economy. And then there is the citizenry, which has for decades demanded access, participation and opportunities and that, despite this, continues to be characterized by an obvious separation between those assuming themselves to be citizens and those living from the government and expecting that their well-being will derive from it.

Each element of the context in which the election takes place entertains its own importance and will impact its evolution, but perhaps the most relevant of these at this moment is the historical one due to that many of the decisions made decades ago created the complex maze in which Mexicans currently find themselves, as well as because the President has his sights firmly trained on the rearview mirror.

Today’s political structure embodies two origins: one is that of the old PRI system erected nearly a century ago, and the other is what resulted from the 1996 Electoral Reform. The former has undergone affectations, the most consequential being the disappearance of the binomial PRI-presidency with the defeat of the PRI in 2000, which dismantled the hyper presidency of yesteryear, but which did not alter the enormous sources of the power of the presidency, those that the President has reconstituted and taken advantage of with tremendous dexterity.

The 1996 Electoral Reform engendered equitable conditions of competition and a structure that guarantees cleanness, neutral and flawless organization of the elections. But the other side of that electoral reform was that it preserved the old system, extending the privileges that one party had enjoyed (then the PRI) to the three most electorally successful parties. It also generated conditions to impede to the maximal extent the creation of new political parties. That is to say, it expanded the monopoly that was formerly exclusive to the PRI but this did not modify the fact that it was still in essence a monopoly. In other words, it changed the way power was acceded to, but the management of power remained without substantive changes.

Those elements of the context are key for the election in the offing in Mexico in that they explain many of the difficulties facing the opposition in terms of assembling alliances, attracting workable candidates and staging an operation likely to triumph in the 2024 presidential election. Party leaderships enjoy the benefits of the monopoly, do not encounter any competition, manipulate the candidacies at will and have a sure source of income that underwrites full impunity for them. No one should be surprised that “citizen” candidacies arise in the sense that they are not assume themselves to be partisan.

The constitution of a solid opposition candidacy ends up rowing against the current and being up against innumerable impediments, which to date have benefitted the party of the government. The requisite question is whether this closes off all possibilities.

The answer is obvious: doors close or open depending on the capacity of procuring alternatives. Mexico is not the first country with authoritarian elements and a government determined to conduct the succession in its own way and without the least heedfulness in matters of (in)compliance with the respective laws. Additionally, there are three novel factors: the opposition won in 2021; now the party of the establishment is Morena (the voters have cast their ballots against incumbents in the government in nearly all elections since 1997); and, more importantly, however much he wishes to avoid it, the President is losing control by the minute. The pertinent question in the end is the following: how an alternative candidacy can be organized and what is necessary for this to be possible.

Although there are the means for building a candidacy, the obvious ones are not always conducive to success: the dedazo entails huge costs and within the opposition no one is there to confer it, and primaries in Mexico tend to subtract more than they add. The opposition must find some mechanism that allows the presentation of aspirants so that, in natural fashion, a candidacy can emerge that will, in the last analysis, attracts the majority of voters, thus becoming unstoppable.

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Luis Rubio

A virtue of the President that merits recognition is transparency: in contrast with his recent predecessors, there is full congruence between his discourse and his vision of the country and of the function of politics and its relationship with the economy. He tells it as he sees it. Different from his forerunners, he entertains not the least concern for claiming to be what he is not, nor the least intention of governing for everyone. Nor does he claim to resolve the country’s problems nor much less to create a platform for the future. His agenda waxes nostalgic as does his congruous vision. The question is whether it is sustainable.

In the eighties Mexico abruptly changed direction in its strategy of development. Therein lies the President’s great bone of contention: his vendetta regarding it derives from that moment in Mexico’s history believing that the post-Revolutionary development project was betrayed. Behind this notion lies a nodal fallacy: that the change was voluntary promoted by contrived technocrats who did not know the country’s history and who, consequently, imposed a world view contrary to the interests of the nation.

The veering off course that the country underwent during those years responded to two inescapable circumstances:  one was the virtual bankruptcy of the Mexican government at the beginning of the eighties. The immediate cause of the crash was the fiscal excesses of the governments of Echeveria and López Portillo, which precipitated the economic collapse of 1982, the debt crisis, a recession nearly a decade long and extraordinary levels of inflation. The indirect cause was that those governments resorted to the concentration of power and functions in the presidency with the objective of restoring the capacity of economic growth, which resulted in being impossible, provoking the collapse. The pretense that by pursuing today the failed objectives of that time could end otherwise simply by avoiding fiscal excesses is unsustainable.

The other cause of the crash was that the world had changed. What the technocrats, despised by the president, observed was that the so-called model of “stabilizing development” that had yielded such good results in prior decades was no longer sustainable. If the objective was to advance and accelerate the development, the country would have to change its growth model, in congruence with the growing diminution of barriers to industrial, commercial, financial and informational exchanges that the technology had begun to drive. In a word: Mexico had to immerse itself in the world or be immersed in the crisis.

The great challenge in attaining those grandiose objectives lay in the incompatibility of the old political system with a modern economy, one integrated with the rest of the world. That is, to be successful, the country had not only to change its economy, but also all its internal structures. However, the “secret” behind the abrupt swerve in direction in the economic project that started in the eighties was that the “real” objective was that of reinitiating the accelerated growth of the economy to avoid modifying the political system. The incompatibility here was understood, but it was claimed to be manageable.

In that contradiction, in that original sin, resides the true difference between the current government and its precursors. The governments of the eighties forward carried out multiple institutional reforms, all of those conceived to protect the economic reforms and confer effective content on the regulations that were required because of both the reforms themselves and of the commercial agreements that had been negotiated.  Thus, were born the regulatory entities in matters of competition, communications, energy, etcetera. In parallel fashion, the Supreme Court of Justice was reformed and, in ministering to the growing post-electoral conflict, the electoral institutions were built.

The paradigm was one of limiting the vast presidential powers, which the presidents that came thereafter observed, at least by keeping appearances. Along the way, incongruencies presented themselves that produced the clash between the demands of a modern economy and the tangible reality at ground zero: beginning with the vast regional disparities in growth, but also the rise pf organized crime, the violence and the insecurity of the population, the dysfunctionality in the Federation–States relationship, and the perverse incentives of the local authorities in fiscal, security and judicial matters.

Those incoherencies and contradictions are the essence of the break brought about by AMLO. In contrast with former presidents, he has acted under a distinct paradigm: he does not profess to construct a modern country. Rather, his project consists of exactly the opposite, in cancelling the modern part of the country to restore the congruence between the economic and the political.

From that perspective, there is no need for him to provide explanations on the espionage engaged in by the government, on the fate of the public expenditure or on the links between his government and the other nations to which he devotes time and resources. In a closed system, one that is introverted (and inevitably authoritarian), the government does not have to explain anything.

The incongruencies are real and within sight of all. The new incongruency lies in pretending that what does function can be cancelled instead of resolving what stands in its way.

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