Will Mexico’s leftist government show pragmatism in dealing with the next U.S. administration or just keep bashing Donald Trump and watch the dismal effects on its economy, asks Mexican political commentator Luis Rubio.
MEXICO CITY — U.S.-Mexico ties will always be complex: two nations that share a long border, yet have enormous historical, cultural and economic differences. Theoretically, the relationship is also a tremendous source of opportunities.
Now, following the United States’ presidential elections, Mexico’s government must clarify its expectations of our northern neighbor and how it intends to deal with the incoming Republican administration of Donald J. Trump. Our first priority of course is figuring out how to will deal with our own problems and shortcomings, which some will say is the ultimate source of our past discrepancies and tensions with the United States.
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There are three dimensions to be considered here: Firstly, the depth and importance of our economic interaction. This may be the world’s most dynamic frontier (with more than $3 million worth of trade per minute), letting through the exports that keep our economy going. In a word, there is no way to minimize the importance to Mexico of this commercial relationship.
Blunt truths
The second aspect concerns changes, made evident in the last elections, affecting American society both inside and in its relations with the world. We’re seeing a veritable epochal shift in response to stark internal divisions, to changes to the so-called world order and China’s emergence as a factor in this change, and to resurgent geopolitics in a dynamic global setting.
Thirdly and more closely related to Trump’s recent triumph: the bilateral relationship will become more transactional, with often asymmetrical exchanges that will nonetheless be transparent.
In contrast with more traditional administrations, Trump is clear and direct, with simple likes and dislikes, and a tendency to be blunt in both private and public. Above all, not everything in his mind is about Mexico.
How does the Sheinbaum government perceive the United States?
His vision may seem brutal, but he is not necessarily mistaken, especially when speaking about our country. Indeed, you would have to be blind to insist all is well in Mexico. This might be the time then to act preventively: by tackling our own problems in areas like crime, education and energy, and more broadly by addressing developmental needs.
In plainer terms, how does the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum perceive the United States? Can it see that the opportunities and risks inherent in this relationship largely depend on our own decisions? In bygone days of protected national economies, governments could hide behind geographical distance or notions of sovereign independence. Today, these constraints have become gloriously irrelevant, and potentially harmful, notions when exportation is what decides whether we have prosperity, or no economy at all.
Looking in the mirror
In an ideal world, every country would define its interests, objectives and preferences, then set about realizing them in practice. In the real world, options are restricted and the cowwnsequences of errors, plentiful. That doesn’t mean Mexico must simply submit to U.S. demands but it does require addressing its own failings, which have contributed to the reality we all know today.
Geography has given us an immense opportunity.
In a word, the best way to assure that ‘sovereignty’ we so cherish is through a strong economy and developed society. Nothing beats those two elements. But has the new government grasped what this implies?
Geography has given us an immense opportunity, yet as a country we have failed so far to create the conditions allowing physical connection with our neighbors to power our country’s comprehensive development. We may appreciate or despise the Americans, but they are if nothing else, a singular opportunity. That’s how we should look at them.
Complex phase
As for our weaknesses, in the making over decades of bad decisions by policymakers, touch key areas as education (where government objectives seemingly pursue everything but personal development), healthcare (where the state has reduced options and impeded an efficient system that would even benefit the neediest), and our mistaken priorities concerning infrastructures for the economy.
We’ve engaged in absurd commercial spats, and are now planning to overhaul a stressed judicial system in a way that will surely send investors running. All in all, we have been consistently adept at blocking development.
The problem is not Trump or the Americans, but our own national myth-making.
The problem is not Trump or the Americans, but our own national myth-making, which may be the real obstacle to our development. We seem to have an open, dynamic Mexico on the one hand, sharing the land with a backward, crime-ridden and intimidated half of the same population. Trump has pointed this out, and we can hardly blame him.
The change of administration will usher in a complex phase, but our interdependence remains the bigger reality. Now, should we pick the wrong path and face down “the gringos,” or take this change as a cue to work differently, work better, and push our country to a better place?
There is no better guide to determine whether a leadership connects with the circumstances of the country than gauge whether her vision of the past and of the future matches the budgetary reality. There is nothing more concrete than the content of the governmental budget, in that therein are shaped the priorities, the interests and the perspectives that the governor imprints on her administration and on the future of the nation. All the rest, as a former Mexican president once said, is demagoguery.
“The past is prologue” wrote Shakespeare, but in governmental matters the past frequently ends up being a burden because its components linger permanently embedded in the laws, rules, and above all, in budgets. Decisions once made, perhaps justifiable within the context from which they arose, they are in the end consummated deeds that become acquired rights, thus untouchable. Many labor contracts, cash transfers and innumerable budgetary items become political realities that restrain the country from advancing. The English novelist L.P. Hartley fully summed up the problem: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. The key to the budget of a new government dwells on dealing with the burdens of the past, especially the fiscal deficit, but building the foundations of a different future.
‘Nothing is more important than investing for the future’ reads the rhetoric of political candidates, but very infrequently -in Mexico practically never- do these investments come about. Regarding the government, the crucial part is not doing the things, but rather creating the conditions for these to occur, that implying investments under at least three key rubrics: education, health and infrastructure. In addition, given Mexico’s circumstances, a fourth factor must be included, that is, public security, without which all the rest would be irrelevant. Are these the priorities of the government?
Despite overwhelming evidence at the worldwide level that education is the principal asset to be able to count on for any nation, Mexico continues to be firmly lodged in the past. Worse yet, the outgoing government not only did not break with that sorry tradition, but also procured the politization of education to an even greater degree. Countries without natural resources, such as Japan, Korea and Singapore, converted education into their ticket out to development and all of these transformed themselves, achieving very high growth rates and a consequent rapid diminution of poverty. The same can be said regarding health, the obverse side of the coin of education. These the two crucial factors allow for not only the transformation of persons’ lives but also for the advancement of the development of the country. Are these vectors up for change in the budget?
Infrastructure is another crucial element in this equation but, in contrast with education and health, where the public presence typically predominates, it is perfectly feasible for infrastructure projects to develop with private financing, drastically reducing the need for scarce governmental resources. A view of infrastructure oriented toward the future would involve evident rubrics such as improving communications (and Internet) within the country, guaranteeing the supply of dependable water and energy and raising the quality of highways, ports and border interconnections. For example, it is obvious that Mexico City requires a new first-world airport; the same can be said of the highways (like that of Mexico City—Monterrey and all intermediate entities, all these absolutely saturated). Pondering the future implies not only abandoning irrelevant projects of the past, even those built yesterday…, but developing and building those demanded by the future and a dissatisfied and increasingly frustrated population.
The urgency of facing the problem of security is blatant. How is it possible to aspire to development if the prevailing violence impedes daily life? How is it possible to argue for the future if children live in permanent uncertainty and their parents still worse? The primary and most rudimentary reason for the existence of a government is security, but in Mexico that principle has been evaded in systematic fashion, blaming the neighbors or the past instead of assuming the fact that there are not conditions for the population to live safely and starting from there: from the bottom up. In contrast with the other priorities, this one is more complex to harness, but without this, the others diminish in viability. Paraphrasing Dag Hammarksjold, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, “Security was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”
The previous government did not have one eye trained on the past, but both: as posted on a sign in London some years ago: “A nation that keeps one eye on the past is wise. A nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind.” That is the key question: How to wrest the country free from this conundrum? That is the key question: no government can forget the past, but the mission of the government is to make possible the future. The budget must reflect that look: half toward the past and the other decidedly toward the future.
The relationship with the United States will always be complex due to the enormous differences between the two nations that are so historically, culturally and economically in contrast to each other, but that has not hindered the neighborhood from having become a source of enormous opportunities. Now, once the Americans have elected a new president, the Mexican government must determine what it expects from its neighbor and how it will relate with its new government. Most importantly, the real issue for Mexico is how will it deal with its deficiencies, because that is the true question at heart.
There are three dimensions that must be appreciated. Before anything else, the depth and, above all, the transcendence of the economic interaction. It is perhaps the most dynamic borderland crossing in the world (with more than three million dollars in goods being traded every minute) and the exports that Mexico sends north constitute the main engine of growth of the Mexican economy. In short, there is no way to minimize the relevance and transcendence of this relationship.
A second focus is the fact, evidenced in this election, of the enormous change, even convulsion, that the American society is experiencing both internally and with respect to the rest of the world. The US is going through a complex adjustment process facing deep domestic polarization, a change in the international order and the emergence of China as a transformative factor and the return to geopolitics in a changing world. Its history has always been thus: as Churchill said about them, “Americans will always do the right thing only after they have tried everything else.”
Third, more directly regarding the new reality after the Trump victory, the bilateral relationship will return to a transactional structure where the exchanges will frequently be asymmetrical, but always transparent. In contrast with more traditional governments, Trump is clear, direct and entertains simple preferences, even while his delivery might be aggressive. Not everything in his repertoire is about Mexico: his vision is brusque, but not always wrong and only a blind person would argue that all is well in Mexico. Perhaps it would be high time to act in a preventive manner: by addressing in a direct and clear manner the issues that plague Mexico in security, education, energy, and, more generally, development.
For Mexico, all this is summed up in just one thing: how does the government of Claudia Sheinbaum see the U.S. and whether she understands the opportunities and consequences of its potential options. In an era of isolated economies, it was possible to pretend distance and independence, two artifices that, in the age of economic integration (and the immense importance of the exports for the functioning of the internal economy), are irrelevant, if not counterproductive.
In an ideal world, each country would define its interests, objectives, opportunities and preferences in the abstract to later seek the best way to achieve them. In the real world, the options are limited, and the consequences of erring are multiple. That does not imply that Mexico should yield to the demands of the U.S, but it should indeed call for admitting the deficiencies that the country confronts, these the very ones that gave rise to the reality in which the country finds itself in today. In a word, the only way to guarantee sovereignty lies in having a strong economy and a developed society. Nothing surpasses that. The question is whether the new Mexican government will be willing to assume what that implies.
Geography generated an immense opportunity for Mexico, but as a country Mexico has been negligent in bringing about conditions for the physical connection with its neighbors to the north for these to convert into a lever for the integral development of the country. Mexicans may appreciate or despise the North Americans, but the vicinity offers extraordinary opportunities should Mexico learn how to seize them.
And the deficiencies remit to decisions that have come to be made, or not made, throughout the decades in key areas such as education (where the development of individuals to their maximal potential is what is most distant from governmental projects); health (where instead of favoring an efficient and generalized system the options are closed, especially for the most needy); mistaken priorities (or inexistent ones) in matters of infrastructure to facilitate economic activity; absurd trade conflicts; and a legal regime, and now a judicial one, which today engages more in frightening off and diminishing investment than in promoting the country’s development.
The problem is not Trump or the Americans. It is rather, Mexicans’ own mythologies, which have been the real hindrance to development. Exports show one avenue, but success depends on realizing and accepting that Mexico broke into two nations: the open, competitive Mexico, and the poor, struggling, violent and extorted Mexico. And both Mexicos live next to each other. That is the true complaint that Trump brings to the table, and he is not wrong…
The U.S. presidential succession anticipates a complex stage, but one cannot lose sight that interdependence is a two-way street. If instead of getting our act together, Mexicans were to confront the Americans, it would end up badly. The simultaneous beginning of two administrations is a great opportunity to change the national vectors toward development.
In her speech before Mexican and North American businesspeople the President delivered three messages: first, the free trade agreement between the two nations is key for Mexico and should be strengthened; second, foreign investments are fundamental for the development of Mexico; and third, the investments are safe and there will be clear rules. She guarantees these. The big question is how credible is that guarantee for potential investors.
Madison, the U.S. President at the beginning of the 19th century, explained why the statement of President Sheinbaum is problematic: “It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices [checks and balances] should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” For the “guarantees” that the President offers to entertain credibility among potential investors, be they national or foreign, these guarantees must be sustained in institutional structures that enjoy legitimacy and permanence, precisely contrariwise to what Mexico is experiencing these days.
In fact, only a few hours had gone by after the end of the President’s address before the bilateral business council for her own words to demonstrate the fragility of those guarantees. Instead of stating that Supreme Court justices would resolve disputes in judicial matters, therefore providing support for the separation of powers and for the counterpoise that the latter power would represent, the President asserted that “The judge is exceeding her authority” and that she, the President, is not going to obey an order of a judge, in the case of an “amparo” (a judicial protection order or redress), because “the petition of that judge does not command legal backing.” I do not sit in judgment with respect to the matter-in-dispute because I have no idea who is right in the specific disagreement, I only read the statements and deduct the obvious contradiction between what is being said in one forum and the other.
In the first forum clear rules and guarantees are offered while the second she makes clear that these rules and guarantees do not exist and that the President is the ultimate authority for determining what is legal and what is not. What would a company-associated corporate lawyer conclude from this situation regarding whether potential investors would be interested in investing in Mexico? As Madison in 1788 penned in Federalist Paper 51, checks and balances are the sole guarantee because human beings, the common man and the presidents, one and the same, are not angels and are prone to changing their opinion and embracing the vagaries of the moment.
Were clarity to be lacking in the presidential vision, some days later she closed the circle by claiming that “No judge, nor eight justices, can stop the will of the people of Mexico.” I do not know the will of the people of Mexico, since even with her broad margin of electoral victory the President does not represent the totality of the population. In addition, what was being voted on back on election day was in effect who would govern Mexicans, not the content of every decision or specific legislative proposal. As Ruchir Sharma wrote, “State meddling is rife [in Latin America]. Erratic stabs at judicial reform in Mexico, constitutional reform in Chile and presidential interference in state-owned companies in Brazil are adding to the uncertainty and scaring off international investors.” If the President is right, investment will grow significantly; if Sharma is right, complex times are in store for Mexico and for the project of the new government.
The questions remaining up in the air is whether, as the President stated, “their investments are safe in Mexico.” In the phrase that followed lies the key: “We should all possess the certainty that this will be conducted with clear rules.” Whosoever has observed the way the judicial reform was approved or, worse yet, the secondary laws, will harbor severe doubts concerning what is being understood as “clear rules.” What I observed comprised a collection of chaotic processes, special (and powerful) interests skewing the content of the articles of the new laws, a pack of hounds seeing how to take advantage of the proceedings and an overwhelming majority of legislators simply raising their hand without having any idea (or the least interest) about what was being approved. More than clear rules, what the judicial reform (and its derivatives) portends is the presence of true anarchy in the process of the election of judges, many of these chosen to respond to a certain political leader or criminal.
To an even greater extent than in the rules, what the government is fostering is a growing uncertainty with respect to the future, exactly the opposite of what an investor requires to put their patrimony at risk in Mexico. Uncertainty is not a novel factor in the Mexican government; in point of fact, eliminating uncertainty was the reason why NAFTA was procured in the nineties, thus it becoming the most important factor of stability and economic advance in the last fifty years. The problem today is that there are no guarantees of the permanence of the Agreement, while the Mexican government insists upon heightening the levels of uncertainty.
As the comedian Cantinflas said, “At voting time, it’s all promises… when it’s time to keep them, it’s all excuses.” Certainty is achieved with institutions, not with promises or personal guarantees. It’s never too late to start building it.
“The political left has never understood that, if you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that truism.” This is spelled out by Thomas Sowell, one of the keenest scholars in politico-economic affairs, above all in matters of discrimination, in that he is Black. This circumstance distinguishes him from innumerable intellectuals and politicians and gives him great latitude in asking questions that no one else would dare to or to present ideas that contravene “common sense.”
The recent judgement and sentencing handed down concerning García Luna, ex-Secretary of Public Security of Mexico, has situated the entire Mexican political system in the dock. Although Morena has attempted to elicit political rake-off from the verdict arising from the latter, the reality is that the judgement placed all of Mexico in evidence, especially its governments. It would be easy to try to limit the damage by attributing all the blame to the individual being judged or to his former boss, but a more careful observation would reveal that that’s a street fight of little importance. What really occurred in that judgement is that it disrobed the political system in its totality because it functions at the service of organized crime independently of whomsoever is in charge.
The whole system of government has been condemned. If to that one adds the dysfunctionality that the self-same system entails for the exercise of its normal and day-to-day functions, the case-in-point takes on other dimensions. It is enough to observe the unbalanced relationship in which the presidency engages with the remaining two branches of government and their total submission as of late. The same can be said of the relation between the governors and the presidency, all of which nurtures the insecurity throughout the country.
Mexicans live in a nation where the government is heavy-handed in the extreme, but it does not fulfill its responsibility to preserve the peace and security of the population while economic development advances. These essential responsibilities of any government are not complied with because the whole system is dysfunctional or, rather, because it was not designed for those objectives. The system was indeed designed for the control of the population, a goal it no longer achieves either, given that it is, de facto, devoted to facilitate the effective functioning of organized crime in general and of narcotrafficking in particular.
The political system that persists was created after the end of the Mexican Revolution with the purpose of restoring order -civil and political- and, with that, of promoting economic development. The system was created expressly to confer on the president enormous power, to whom very efficient instruments of control and appeasement were granted. The political party, the distribution of political posts and access to corruption were central elements of the project of the post-Revolutionary government.
It is thanks to that structure that narcotrafficking could flourish without collateral damage. When the movement of drugs began through national territory, from the middle of the past century, everything seemed planned for it to operate: a strong government that could establish rules and that was capable of making them be complied with; Colombian narcotraffickers oriented strictly toward the U.S. market, that is, without permanent local ties; and, above all else, an environment propitious for local authorities -governors, political or military chiefs in each zone- to receive “compensation” for their services in facilitating the transit of narcotics. Consistent with the normality of corruption as a tool of government, narcotrafficking prospered without surcease: the functionaries changed but the business, and the concomitant corruption, persevered.
Decades later the situation changed radically. First, however much Morena tries to recreate the old presidency, the country has already become decentralized; the great achievement of that era -iron-fisted control over criminality- disappeared from the map and there is no strategy in place, nor even a conception of what is necessary, to create a security system coherent with the current realities. The economy is infinitely more complex than back in the day; the governors, subordinated to the president as they are, have not engendered instruments to preserve the internal peace or to promote development. In sum, the existing regime doesn’t work: returning to the past is an absurd notion because it is impossible and incompatible with the circumstances of today and insecurity and violence escalate uncontrollably. In a word, there are there many García Lunas who have taken his place in this troubled river: the relationship between politics and organized crime has been normalized.
The central issue is that the country does not have a functional government while the presidency continues to be excessively powerful. However, as Sowell says in quote at the outset, there continues to be a retinue of believers who consider it best to carry on strengthening the presidency with its bent toward despotism. The evil lies in the excessive concentration of power; the solution is in a presidency with the necessary attributes but also with effective counterweights, which impede the individual occupying that function from abusing its power and from causing destruction left and right, with no limit.
In the golden era of the National Action Party (PAN), the nineties, the party had strong, focused leaderships and a strategic vision that permitted it to begin to build, step by step, the scaffolding that led to its eventually winning the presidency. It was a party of citizens, financed by donations from the society. The mediocrity of its performance and of its leaderships in the successive years took place during the era of governmental financing. Might this be mere coincidence?
The performance of a political party is the result of a multiplicity of factors and cannot be simplified to the degree that the latter paragraph suggests. What can be stated, because it is obvious, is that the PAN did not achieve converting itself into an effective and successful governing party at the federal level. With many exceptions throughout its history of individuals, men and women, who proved to be extraordinary politicians and leaders, in general, the PAN members are not individuals with a vocation for power, something strange for a political party whose raison d’être is precisely that. Distinguished Mexicans of all socioeconomic levels have passed through the PAN, the majority desirous of constructing “a free and generous native land” as its motto has it, but with little inclination for confronting the dilemmas that characterize the labor of governing, which tend to be tough and often less than clear in moral terms.
In contrast, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is a party of power, born out of power and it always recruited persons whose nature and vocation comprised exactly the search for and administration of power. In an article from several years back, Aguilar Camin cites Juan Lezama with an anecdote that describes the PRI cover to cover in its Golden Age: “Then, Elpidio Mendoza attended his first successful anteroom session in the new PRIist era and arrived at the Campaign Desk. –Profession? -Politics. -I mean, what is it that you do and know. -Politics. -But a Doctorate, a master’s degree, a profession, something useful… -Just politics –repeated Elpidio Mendoza as he turned on his heel. And stick it out.”
The biographies of the PAN and the PRI are very distinct, starting with that the former had been engendered expressly as a reaction to the latter. Many citizens associate the PRI with corruption, while the PAN’s main driving force was its criticism of the PRI and the corruption. However, once in power, the PAN mimicked the PRI and became as corrupt as a governing party as its predecessor had been, but running a very inferior quality of governance. Nothing describes the contrast better than the declaration of a PRI politician at the time of the Peña Nieto presidential campaign, proudly declaring that “we might be corrupt but we know how to govern.”
Now that the Electoral Tribunal has endorsed the misdeeds of the current PRI leadership, whose objective appears to be to imitate the conduct of the parties in the service of the highest bidder, all this in the context of an opposition that is clearly in the minority, of almost irrelevance given the abusive way in which the distribution of seats in Congress was carried out, the question is whether either of these two parties will have the capacity to transform themselves in order to compete successfully against the almost hegemonic (but not uniform) movement that governs the country today, or whether new organizations will be born that are capable of competing.
The PAN is currently a much larger party in terms of votes won than the PRI, but both have come face to face with the imperative need to rethink themselves, re-conceive themselves, restructure themselves and transform themselves into forces able to compete successfully with the Morena party in the elections of the coming decades, but starting in 2027 at the federal level and, much sooner, at the local level. Their alternative is plain and simple: die.
After the failed and poorly organized alliance of 2024, each of these formations will continue along its own trajectory, leaving the citizenry who did not vote for Morena (a nothing-to-be-sneered-at 45% of the total) before the tessitura of who could effectively represent it and safeguard its concerns and hopes. The myths and aversions at play between these two groupings are legendary (many justified) and there are wide swaths of the electorate that would never vote for one or the other. In this context, the question is whether one of these will be capable of, effectively, responding to the moment, the circumstance and the demands of the citizenry. The inevitable problems that will confront the Morena government constitute an enormous incentive for that transformation.
As it stands, the outlook for the opposition is not commendable. The cost and complexity of creating a new political party is high, but my impression is that the decline of the PRI constitutes an exceptional opportunity for young and attractive leaders, under the guidance of experienced, illustrious and focused (ex) PRI politicians, to have a high probability of success. Freed from the yoke of the pathetic PRI leadership, the group of powerful women and men who are veterans of many fights, with a quality as statesmen that is almost non-existent in the other organizations, could make a big difference. If this group of visionary characters were capable of building a new political party, free of the scourges that characterized the PRI, it could become an unstoppable force against a Morena, a party-movement that seems to be hegemonic but has such a propensity to fracture, fragment and corrupt, in addition to the enormous governance dilemmas it will face, that it could well be defeated sooner than it might appear.
In July of 1914, one month before the outbreak of World War I, none of the protagonists in what would be a bloody conflagration had any idea of what was to come or, as Christopher Clark writes, they stumbled along like sleepwalkers toward the precipice. The present moment in Mexico entertains a great similarity to the description: the new government is absolutely certain of its vision, which impedes it from assessing what is happening around it whether as a threat, or as the opportunity it could be.
The judicial reform generates antibodies on both sides of the discussion: for those who support it, the new mantra is the universal solution for the country’s problems of justice; for those who vilify it, the new law constitutes a danger to the most basic values of democracy and economic stability. In the earthly world, as diverse interviewees illustrated within the halls of the legislative chambers when the vote for the reform was conducted, the majority of the representatives and senators were not appraised of the content of what they were voting for, nor did they consider whether the bill comprised a viable solution for the problem set forth. Most of the legislators being interviewed did not even know how many articles there are in the Mexican Constitution. The point here is that the judicial reform disrupts the whole system of government, but those responsible for approving it never gave serious thought to the reform’s relevance or implications.
Last week the Supreme Court decided to advance the request to revise the process of approval of the judicial reform and the separation of powers. I am not an attorney, so I will not seek to litigate the affair, but the reaction of Morena Party leaders as well as of President Scheinbaum suggest a full rejection of any action, or interpretation, which does not strictly adhere to the official orthodoxy. And this before having the least notion of what the content could be re what the Supreme Court produces. The obligatory question is whether this is a constructive manner of advancing development or, thinking in terms of the anecdote of WWI, whether there is no way of avoiding a crisis that would place in question the objectives of the government itself, and the country’s future
Some individuals in the administration recognize the inborn risks of the implementation of the reform and its potential consequences both for justice itself (allegedly the objective here) as well as for economic development. However, were one to observe the broader context, the action of the Court opens an enormous opportunity for President Sheinbaum. A more receptive stance could achieve, in one fell swoop, consolidating her government, opening the door to private investment, above all foreign, and laying the foundations of the Rule of Law, the absence of which the country has experienced almost throughout its entire existence. In a word, changing the optics could perhaps render possible the takeoff of the fledgling government.
The judicial reform’s rationale is strictly political. While it is evident that the country lacks a system of justice that effectively attends to and resolves the problems and disputes involving the complaints of the population’s majority, the reform does not focus on any of that. To start with, the overwhelming majority of the issues that the population is concerned with or complain about refer to the states, the latter different from those of the federal jurisdiction, that is the main objective of the reform. Also, it is evident to an even greater extent that the reform would never have been promoted had Minister Zaldívar remained on the Court, thus relinquishing that halo of legitimacy and power that Morena members attribute to the bill.
More to the point, no government in the world likes to have its power limited. Therefore, presidents resort to decrees (to avoid approaching the Legislature) or they nominate justices, magistrates or ministers whom they consider germane to their project.
The reason for the separation of powers is, precisely, that of conferring certainty and predictability on the citizenry in general and on the diverse actors and social agents in particular. The stronger the Executive, ergo the objective of the judicial reform, the lesser the economic development and the greater the uncertainty. That is, if the government attempts to be successful in its projects, it must accept the existence of effective and credible counterweights. The dilemma is real.
In the United States, the Supreme Court was a weak counterweight at the start and, as happens everywhere, the government strove to maintain it thus, beginning with the attempt, in 1800, of an administration to saturate the Judiciary with sympathetic judges, which the following government sought to revert, overturning the respective law. In the constitutional controversy that ensued, Marbury v Madison, the Supreme Court assumed the faculties of constitutional revision, which permitted it to resolve the specific dispute between the incoming and outgoing administrations, but additionally to establish the Court as an arbiter of controversies between the other public branches of government.
The point is that President Sheinbaum cradles in her hands the opportunity to transform the country much beyond what she probably imagined. On accepting the possibility of modifying or, indeed, abolishing the reform, the country would acquire the foundation of a true separation of powers, and she would consolidate her platform to effectively drive the inclusive and equitable development of the country.
“Democracy, writes the scholar Larry Diamond, is a system of government of the majority, limited by counterweights and institutional balances.” This classic definition is clearly not among the new government’s priorities.
A speech, however encouraging, does not a summer make, but it can constitute the first step in the process of reconstruction that the country urgently needs. Beyond personal loyalties and common histories, the past six-year term was not a paragon of virtues, except for those who depend on the government: those on the top of the socioeconomic ladder and those (almost) on the bottom. To prosper, as proposed in the speech by Madam President, it is indispensable to open competition and generate productive enterprises, not governmental contracts and a population dependent on the government. The political profit of both is evident, as reflected in the election, but this does not comprise a solid or sustainable (or financially viable) platform of development, of economic growth or of the reduction of poverty and inequality.
Eliminating the mechanisms that permit, that should indeed guarantee, freedoms and citizen rights, as has been happening on repeated occasions over the last months, implies eradicating legal predictability in a country that requires a much more dynamic economy than the existing one and that, perforce, must attract foreign investment.
The latter is key because Mexico is experiencing an unwonted moment during which all anchors of stability assembled throughout the 20th century disappeared, while those anchors that were attempted to be developed to replace the previous ones, all this in the past three or four decades, did not succeed in their objective.
The country today boasts free elections (this difficult to deny by the new government); very weak, not to say nearly inexistent, protections of citizen rights; and a very differentiated citizenry between those who followed the outgoing president faithfully, and the citizenry that clamored for a schema of counterweights. The departing government eroded the little that did exist and, in its final onslaughts, ended up sowing the seeds of a potential re-creation of the authoritarianism of a century ago, or worse.
The institutional approach is more Bolshevik than liberal or, as the British would say, far from Edmund Burke, the philosopher who critically analyzed the French Revolution, concluding that the key was in the preservation of the laws and freedoms, by means of a competent government. From that perspective, the best that can be expected from the recently installed government is, if everything turns out right, a competent government.
The philosophy that seems to embody the new President diverges from that which the country was trying (sort of) to build in terms of a functional government while being delimited by the structures of the Rule of Law, by considering it necessary to hold monopoly of power -rather than of the law- to advance the country’s development. Both the recent reforms, as well as the frequently employed tools such as preventive imprisonment, could very easily be converted into a mechanism of control and of the submission of a society that, independently of its vote, has demonstrated a historical inclination toward freedom.
It is not unduly excessive here to repeat the famous phrase of Porfirio Díaz, without question no liberal, who stated that “governing Mexicans is more difficult than rounding up turkeys on horseback.” The Mexican, independently of their socioeconomic situation, does not submit easily, as the old colonial saying of “I will obey but will not comply” suggests. Although she calls it freedom, the implicit pretention to subordinate a populace that lives on a day-by-day basis and depends on exports is extraordinarily ambitious, if not rash.
In fact, the new orthodoxy deviates from the previous one. For example, in the previous administration appointments to key entities such as the National Human Rights Commission, the National Electoral Institute, the Supreme Court and, even, the Bank of Mexico were driven by loyalty. Today’s criteria is ideological: whomever fits is welcome; the rest are left out. With this I do not mean to suggest that the nominations of her predecessors were pristine or always ideal, but there was, at the very least, the goal, even the propensity, to name persons “technically” qualified for the critical posts, something surely not a criterion in recent years.
In his writings on Napoleon, Simon Schama describes this personage as “was the prototype of a modern despot, cynically assuming that the majority of the people cared little or nothing for liberty or constitutions or the vaunted ‘sovereignty of the people’ and so he could easily dispossess them of it, substituting for freedom the pyrrhic dazzle of military triumph.” If one were to remove from this sentence the last two words, military triumph, and were to substitute electoral victory for them, the scheme does not seem all that alien.
Whether one likes it or not, the future of Mexico is bound to the rest of the world. Ratifying or adopting measures, laws and regulations that reduce or eliminate counterweights and attempting against the most basic principles of the Rule of Law, this understood as the protection of citizen rights with respect to governmental action, is counterproductive for the President herself, and implies to play with fire and call into question everything the she says she wants to achieve.
The end of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador opens a new stage for the Mexican political system. In the last half-century, Mexico went from a highly structured system around a political party that was also a complex system of participation and control to a shallow democracy with weak institutions that have now been seriously eroded, if not destroyed. Thanks to the strength of his personality and political skill, López Obrador maintained the cohesion of Mexican politics in general and of his party in particular, which hid the severe and accelerated political degradation behind the scenes. Now, with the succession resolved, the risks and fractures with which the winner of the election and the country in general will have to deal will become evident. The outgoing president planned to concentrate, consolidate, and exercise power, his personal power, but not for the future of the country.
The great magic of the old political system lay in the expectation that there would always be a new opportunity to reinvent the country with the change of governments. The mechanism was inherent in the political structure derived from the pacts that shaped the National Revolutionary Party (PNR, the “grandfather” of the PRI) and which, much later, Cosío Villegas would call a “non-heritable sexennial monarchy.” The critical factor lay in the fact that the power of the president was not disputed but at the same time had limited validity, so the country could reinvent itself in the next round, which yielded a factor of certainty during the six-year term, but of absolute uncertainty regarding the future: the only thing that remained was the hope that the next government, by reinventing the wheel, would solve the problems, the new and the ancestral ones, and create opportunities for the future. Authoritarian or not, the system worked for several decades because it allowed a change in the political elite and preserved the hope for a better future. At the end of each six-year term, the same concerns were debated: from the role or influence of the outgoing president to the stability of the economy. Nothing has changed in that, except the dimensions of what is at stake, but that difference – the additional degree of uncertainty – is entirely due to the outgoing president.
When a government was bad, it was stated that “no evil lasts six years, and no people can stand it.” When it was good, the citizenry rewarded it with a favorable vote in the successor’s election. The process was dynamic and demonstrated a high degree of understanding on the part of the so-called “revolutionary family” of both its mission as a provider of conditions for economic growth and its concern for citizen sentiment. The political system of the time was not democratic (nor did it pretend to be), but it evidenced a recognition of the need to act in response to the needs of the citizenry. Above all, the “system,” whose heart lay in the presidency-PRI binomial, was sustained by the PRI, the institution that conferred continuity, control, and discipline.
Over the decades, each president pursued economic strategies that sought to respond to the circumstances of the moment, and, for much of the 20th century, those circumstances were relatively simple compared to today’s world, facilitating an essentially introspective view. The combination of concentrated power around the presidency and the ability to modify government strategies according to the president’s reading of the specific moment had significant consequences. In fact, this characteristic made the rulers directly responsible to the population for the future of their government because, when their actions were successful, they were rewarded by the electorate; however, when the results of their administration failed due to their own actions or for ignoring the international context (as occurred in the seventies and early eighties), the cost was borne entirely by those presidents, who suffered widespread opprobrium after their government. Claudia Sheinbaum’s election result leaves no room for doubt about where Andrés Manuel López Obrador will be at the end of his term.
Good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, popular or not, the presidents of yesteryear did not take a step without a huarache: when the time of succession came, they resorted to transactional mechanisms to ensure a favorable vote, in addition to employing all the electoral fraud mechanisms necessary to ensure an overwhelming triumph. Indeed, PRI victories were legendary, frequently reaching votes exceeding 80% of the total vote (and in 1976, there was not even an opposition candidate competing with José López Portillo). The use of government handouts in exchange for votes is not exceptional when looking at the rest of the world (the nature of the exchange varies, but not the fact itself), while systematic fraud of the sort that came to take place in some elections in the mid-20th century certainly was. Today, in 2024, we find ourselves in another stage of Mexican politics in which political competition is real, and the rules for the administration of the electoral processes and the qualification of the election are the product of autonomous entities that enjoy broad legitimacy and widespread recognition. This, of course, does not prevent the presence of all kinds of deceptions to influence how citizens vote, but these occur mainly outside the scope of the National Electoral Institute.
The country’s political reality is one of deep contrasts -for example, very successful regions and other very backward ones- but today, there is a wealth of information regarding these circumstances that would have been inconceivable only a few decades ago. Today, the channels of communication that facilitate public discussion of national issues favor the advance and retreat of political and partisan options, as well as the emergence of citizen candidacies, something also difficult to imagine in the recent past. Of course, Mexico is far from a consolidated democracy, a widely successful economy, or a minimally satisfied society. Still, it is no longer the self-absorbed, isolated, and poor nation of a few decades ago. In a word, the political reality of the country has changed dramatically, except for the current president’s attempt to return to the most primitive and condemnable practices of the past, including the agenda of constitutional reforms he proposed on February 5, 2024, whose common denominator consists of constitutionally strengthening the presidency and reducing the mechanisms for counterbalancing and protecting the citizenry from State actions.
This is the only way to explain his crusade and unbridled activism to guarantee the electoral result of his preference, for which he was clearly willing to use any resource, starting with the purchase of votes, followed by the control of the institutions and entities responsible for the conduction, administration, and qualification of the election, essentially the National Electoral Institute (INE), as well as the respective Tribunal. In the same sense, he used the presidential pulpit to promote his messages and his candidates and to attack and disqualify any dissent or criticism. In light of the outcome of the presidential election, it is evident that his crusade was successful in terms of the victory achieved by his candidate, leaving the determination of the broader consequences of his actions to the future. This confirms that the presidential actions throughout the six-year term had the primary objective of achieving this success. What remains to be elucidated is whether his investment in sources of loyalty to himself will have additional implications.
The Strategy
The first indication that President López Obrador’s six-year term would be different from that of his predecessors was evident from the moment his disinterest-indeed, radical opposition to promoting economic growth became clear. In contrast to all his predecessors since the end of the Mexican Revolution more than a century ago, President López Obrador does not conceive of government or power as an instrument for the country’s economic development. While all of his predecessors focused on promoting economic activity, some with more success than others, this government’s priority, from the beginning, was the succession of 2024 and nothing else. For the president, the objective and rationality of his government were merely power and guaranteeing a safe succession that would continue with his way of seeing the world. Now, in the twilight of the six-year term, the country will have to begin to understand and deal with the consequences of such a poorly institutionalized government for the future of the country.
The formal structure of the division of powers of the Mexican political system did not correspond to the reality of power that characterized it throughout the 20th century. While there was a judiciary and a legislature, the dominance of the executive branch was legendary. However, this dominance was tempered by the existence of the official party, whose institutional structure favored the turnover of elites and the continuity of power. The famous British call that “the king is dead, long live the king” was reproduced in the Mexican system in an (almost) natural way, allowing the assumption of power and the definition of its limits. In recent decades, for various reasons, Mexico has experienced the extinction of this political control and institutional structure, presumably to be replaced by a democratic system that was never fully consolidated. Because of this, important questions remain that only time will elucidate, beginning with the power of the outgoing president after his successor is inaugurated and the potential emergence of competitive power structures in the form of regional or national caudillos. In other words, institutional weakness is now gaining new momentum as an issue of paramount importance.
AMLO and the Economy
One of the paradoxes of the six-year term that ended lies in the economy’s growth. Although the president opted for a strategy that expressly refrained from promoting growth (and the public and private investment that would have been necessary to achieve that result), the circumstances of the country and the world translated into relatively unusual growth rates in the second half of the presidential term. In the administration’s first year, the economy did not grow, and then came the pandemic, which severely contracted economic activity; however, by the fourth year, the economy began to accelerate to 3.1% in 2023. This figure is slightly higher than the 2.5% average experienced over the past three decades, but what is significant is that previous administrations devoted enormous financial, bureaucratic, and human resources to investment promotion. However, in a paradox of history, it was the president who did not carry out such investments (and opposed them) who benefited from those decades of reforms and who is now seen especially in the strength of the export sector (especially manufacturing, agribusiness and mining), which functions independently of (some would say despite) government activity. In fact, this should not be surprising: the main objective of negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement at the beginning of the 1990s was to depoliticize investment decisions. The aim was to provide certainty to investors that future Mexican governments would not change the rules of the game thanks to the existence of an international treaty. The paradox is that the greatest beneficiary of that treaty and the reforms that followed was the president, who opposed the reforms and consistently denounced them.
Throughout the López Obrador administration and despite the rhetoric that “the poor come first”, for the president, the poor were merely an electoral instrument because reducing poverty was against his succession objective. Although it may seem contradictory, the president, a connoisseur of power, chose to ensure his succession not by improving the population’s living standards but by building a structure of loyalties that would guarantee that the population owed its vote to the president or to whomever he chose. While an improvement in disposable income for families obviously contributes to reducing poverty, the subsidies that the president sought in cash transfers followed a political logic, not an economic one. Getting out of poverty would imply entering the labor market in such a way that this exit would acquire permanence and a gradual increase in both the income and the capital of the members of the family that was once in poverty (an objective that, at least nominally, was pursued by programs of previous six-year terms, such as Progresa, Prospera and the like). In a word, a strategy to break with poverty – especially in the digital era – requires sustained economic growth and the availability of means to increase people’s social capital, especially education and health.
President López Obrador’s strategy had a different objective: the improvement of family income through direct cash transfers that, by definition, would lessen the symptoms of poverty, but would not diminish it; instead, it implied a relationship of dependency. There is no contradiction in this: the objective was to create dependency on the government that would translate into loyalty to the person of the president, which required that the “structural,” so to speak, situation of people in poverty not change. The rationale for this logic was very clear and conscious: in the words of Morena’s president at the beginning of the six-year term, “When you take people out of poverty, and they become middle class, they forget where they come from, because people think the way they live.” In short, the poor are a reserve of votes, and the last thing that suits Morena is to have fewer poor people and more middle-class people because those people stop conceiving themselves as “people” to think as citizens. Economic growth ends up being a curse for the only objective that allegedly motivated this administration: to ensure the triumph in 2024.
The economic evolution of the six-year term that concluded has not been exactly as the president planned it, at least according to the conception outlined by the president of Morena mentioned in the previous paragraph. First, the cash transfers made by the government, but in the name of the president, as if it were his own money, have had the effect of improving the lives of the people who appear in the census that the president and his team built (whose formal criteria and nominal list are not public). In other words, the transfers have successfully strengthened the individuals and families who are beneficiaries of these programs (seniors, youth, and other target audiences). Still, dependence on the government, which is the express objective, is preserved. As the attached graph illustrates, the increase in the population’s consumption throughout the second half of the six-year term is clear evidence of the success of the presidential strategy. It explains, at least in part, the loyalty experienced by the president during these years on the part of the benefited population and, of course, their vote last June 2nd.
Secondly, the increase in the minimum wage promoted by the president benefits the entire population within the formal economy, raising the real disposable income of an important segment of the citizenry. The transfers and the minimum wage modified the population’s perceptions and probably constituted an important factor in explaining the president’s popularity. However, although he benefits from these actions, the dynamics of each of them are different: while the cash transfers have a direct and tangible electoral objective, the minimum wage increase is more difficult to politicize because its beneficiaries are generic, not specific; that is, all those who earn a minimum wage benefit, not only those who are within Morena’s electoral roll. One way or another, the average population has experienced an improvement in its real income after inflation, which also explains the increase in consumption at the popular level.
The Economy and Votes
The governments of yesteryear -from the Revolution to 2018- sought votes through two paths: on the one hand, they sought to adopt economic and investment strategies that would translate into significant economic improvement that would, in turn, raise living standards and thus satisfy the population, trusting that this would translate into a favorable vote for the outgoing government. From the rural infrastructure development programs in the 1930s to the highway construction program, the expansion of the electrical grid, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, to cite three very different types of strategies, all governments sought to accelerate the economy’s growth. The success of the first decades after the end of the Revolution can be seen not only in the growth of the economy itself but also in social mobility, the growth of cities, and, with them, of an incipient middle class. Just as there were highly successful governments (those of the era known as “stabilizing development” between the forties and the beginning of the seventies stand out), there were also those whose ambitions were much more significant than their capacity to lead the national economy, as occurred in the seventies, which culminated in the foreign debt crisis of 1982. In this sense, some of those governments were highly successful, while others provoked terrible crises. Still, there was not a single one that had not followed the logic of progress through economic growth, similar to what one could observe almost anywhere on the planet.
The government of President López Obrador broke with that rationality. Convinced that the country’s problems began with, and are a product of, the reforms undertaken since the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s, the president set about rebuilding the idyllic world of his memory as a PRI leader in his home state of Tabasco. The central elements of his vision are summarized as: a strong presidency that decides without limitation by autonomous or regulatory bodies; PEMEX as the main source of demand in the economy; economic power subordinated to political power; and the construction of a hegemonic party, for which it is legitimate to use all the resources of the State. What was never clear in the presidential project before his inauguration in 2018 was the abandonment of the developmental project characteristic of all presidents throughout the twentieth century.
For the president, the only important thing was his succession project, an objective for which all the resources and capacities of the government were allocated, starting with the most successful of all, the so-called “mañanera,” a daily exercise of communication and manipulation of public opinion that achieved and consolidated the high level of popularity enjoyed by the president, even when the economy, security, health and education, among other key factors for the life of the citizenry, experienced serious deteriorations.
In this context, how the government sought to ensure presidential succession relied on political rather than economic initiatives. Consequently, everything done throughout the six-year term followed a strictly electoral logic: where are the votes and how to ensure that government programs make them dependent on government handouts, but always in the president’s name. Transfers to senior citizens, youth, and other target audiences had a strictly political logic, and the evidence shows that poverty was not one of the relevant criteria. In other words, the narrative was integrated with a discourse of fighting poverty, but the government’s strategy was much more direct as if it were a laser beam: to secure votes. Whether the combination of discourse, narrative, and transfers will succeed remains to be seen.
Unlike his predecessors, the president sought to build a platform of dependence on his person; similar to his predecessors, he developed a series of mechanisms dedicated to buying votes. In the post-revolutionary era, many governments sought votes following a transactional logic: candidates invented all sorts of mechanisms to exchange favors for votes. In one era, they distributed household goods; in another, they distributed breakfasts or food, all in exchange for the promise of a vote; more recently, they invented cards that produced cash in ATMs. The mechanics were facilitated, at the same time that the degree of certainty of the effectiveness of the exchange was raised, with the appearance and generalization of the use of cellular telephones, since with that, the providers of benefits exchange the favor for the photograph of the vote itself. Whatever the mechanics, ancient or modern, the purpose was always transparent. Regardless of the performance of the outgoing government, the candidate offers an “incentive” for the voter to respond favorably on election day. If one adds the two together, the electoral project acquires an inexorable political meaning.
Many of the electoral strategies that characterized the PRI era of the 20th century were eradicated by the electoral reform of 1996, which legislated (with the unanimous approval of all the political forces of the time) the creation of not only an autonomous authority dedicated to the administration of the elections and the qualification of the election. With this, all kinds of devices well known by Mexicans throughout the 20th century disappeared, some with peculiar names (such as the “crazy mouse”), but all of them aimed at achieving the expected result through the manipulation of the electoral roll, the factious use of the media or the abuse of governmental instruments to close the opposition’s way. With the 1996 reform, all these practices were prohibited. Although what followed was not perfect, it constituted a scheme of impeccable fairness for electoral competition, as shown by the innumerable alternations of parties in power at all levels of government. One of the questions raised by the recent election is whether these judgments are still valid: the result was so overwhelming that it opens a vast range of possibilities, much of it potentially regressive.
The electoral reform referred to, in its constitutional component, was unanimously approved by all political forces of the time, except for the PRD, Morena’s predecessor, which refused to vote in favor of the secondary legislation. That is to say, there was always a reticence, if not skepticism, within the contingent that today leads Morena concerning the electoral legislation and the institutions that emanate from it. From this perspective, it is no coincidence that López Obrador refused to recognize the 2006 electoral result and that he and a good part of his followers continue to argue that his defeat resulted from electoral fraud. Twelve years later, the president confronted the INE board on repeated occasions, and through the appointment of people loyal to him, he devoted himself to weakening, if not subjugating, the electoral authority to his preferences. This closes the siege built by the president, which includes all the elements he was structuring to ensure his victory in the June 2024 elections: the narrative, the money transfers, the electoral authority, and his own political activism and control of a large part of the country’s institutional apparatus.
The Polls
Another enigma that only time will allow to clarify lies in the enormous variance -highly different preferences among them- in the different pollsters’ results throughout the electoral process. In addition to this, decades after the country began to have professionally managed electoral processes and a significant improvement in the living standards of the population, the six-year term that now concludes has created a paradox that only time will allow to clarify in full: while the number of people who assume themselves as citizens grows, loyalty to the president due to his narrative and social programs also strengthens. Will this be a contradiction? An incongruity? Time will tell.
According to a survey by Alejandro Moreno (El Financiero, May 2, 2023), sixty percent of Mexicans say they are satisfied with their lives, have seen their real income grow, and have a job. The same 60% support the president and consider that his administration has made possible the stability and well-being they enjoy. On the other hand, the remaining 40% disapprove of the president’s management because they consider that it is damaging the foundations of future welfare and threatening the prospects for growth and well-being. One wonders what makes two groups in the same society have such radically contrasting perceptions of the same phenomenon or historical moment. According to Moreno, the fundamental difference between the two groups of Mexicans is the level of schooling: while the university vote was crucial in the president’s election in 2018, today, that cohort represents the most critical segment of their work. The two most substantial contingents underpinning the president’s popularity are older Mexicans and people with less schooling. The inescapable conclusion is that those most disadvantaged in their income and prospects for life and employment have benefited from economic stability, growth in real disposable income, and a labor market that, post-pandemic, has offered greater employment opportunities. At the same time, this logic carries the seeds of its own future dysfunctionality, given that the most dynamic economy with the best prospects is one linked to the information economy, which, by definition, requires a radically different type of education than the one favored by the president. Another paradox: poor but with spending power, a recipe for a single election.
Twenty-eight years after the landmark 1996 electoral reform, the country has advanced in certain aspects but has regressed in many others and, thanks to the laws (and tactics) promoted by the government in electoral matters (the famous “Plan B,” followed by “Plan C”), the likelihood of further deterioration in both political and security matters can no longer be discounted. The outstanding achievement in electoral matters -certainty about the process, but not about the outcome- could well be reversed in an attempt to impose an outcome regardless of the electorate’s will. That reform, a great citizen triumph -perhaps the greatest in our history- could be seeing its last days.
And this is all the more important in light of how little progress Mexican democracy has made in all other areas. Although progress was made in electoral matters from 1997 onwards (the first federal election after 1996, already with an “even floor”), the country could hardly be called democratic when no more than 58% of the electorate* claims to be citizens (versus 42% who assume themselves to be “people”), hardly a majority willing (and able) to defend their rights. More to the point, no one could seriously argue that the country enjoys peace, a path towards greater equality of opportunities, an effective system of government, “prompt and expeditious” justice, and transparency and accountability on the part of the responsible authorities. Clearly, things have changed, in many cases improved, from the “hard-line” PRI era, but Mexico does not fully qualify as democratic by conventional international measures.
This picture suggests that Mexico has returned – or at least is moving in the direction of – a prehistoric, indeed pre-democratic, era of national political life. The president has not had the slightest scruple in employing all the resources at his disposal to secure his electoral objective. When a path was closed to him -for example, a call from INE (already biased) to refrain from being so crass in its forms- he invented twenty constitutional reforms (the “Plan C”) to be able to have a “legal” presence in the political and, therefore, electoral sphere, every day. He also did not have the slightest qualms in presenting himself as the head of the campaign of his candidate, whom he named, controlled, and obstructed throughout the process (which, in addition, raised all kinds of speculations about the relationship that would characterize the two political actors after the elections of June 2024).
President López Obrador’s legacy will be multifaceted. His economic strategy achieved its goal, but the extraordinary increase in the fiscal deficit by 2024 leaves a question mark over the stability and sustainability with which his successor will receive the fiscal accounts; his security strategy enjoys an almost unanimous level of disapproval; his electoral strategy was successful in achieving his goal of electing the successor of his choice, but at the cost of a severe deterioration of the political institutions, including the electoral ones, which were built over the past four decades.
Mythical leaders enjoy temporary advantages but almost always end up being ephemeral in the long term. The bills of a government that is poor in results -arrogant and, at the same time, modest in its objectives- will be paid sooner or later. Still, the calendar may not respect economic, political, or emotional times. The bills always arrive, and it will be there where the circumstances of the moment and the astuteness of the winner will determine the outcome and her capacity to govern. It is worse when the country the president leaves behind lacks solid institutions capable of conferring viability to the government and governance and without the characteristics and skills of the president himself.
Beyond the election itself, the political-structural legacy of the government will be much more transcendent and relevant than is apparent, but not necessarily in a benign way. Because of his history and characteristics, the outgoing president is unrepeatable, and the election winner will have to find her own way to face the challenges -hers and the country’s- that lie ahead. Like no one else in the whole post-revolutionary era, she will face the enormous challenge of building at least a minimum scaffolding to be able to govern, given that the previously existing structures -those conceived since Plutarco Elías Calles and those that were forged for a democratic era in the last decades- have been worn out and are already inoperative, if not counterproductive. Governing her own party -an entity without structures that only its founder could articulate- will be a major challenge, and that is if the outgoing president does not try to hinder it. The so-called country of institutions runs the risk of fragmenting under the shadow of caudillos, regional leaders, and organized crime, all of this in the middle of the 21st century with an economy that lives and functions exclusively thanks to a free trade agreement with our complex northern neighbor.
There is a saying, “To every little saint comes his little party.” The “fiestecita” that begins in 2024 entails exceptional opportunities but also enormous internal and external risks. The country has lived five years as if inside a bubble, connected to the rest of the world but pretending that it is independent and can isolate itself without major consequences. The new president will soon find that the viability of the main engine of growth of the Mexican economy is at risk and that the call to account for omissions and acts contrary to the letter and spirit of NAFTA will come sooner rather than later. At that moment, Mexicans will know what kind of president we have and her capacity to face these challenges.
In the British, but also the PRI sense, “the king is dead; long live the queen.” All citizens must tuck her in because she will require all the national support that, as citizens, we must trust, will be reciprocated with civility and without polarization.
*Alejandro Moreno’s figures in the aforementioned survey.
Paradoxical how in the end they come together. Peña Nieto’s big mistake was not his corruption, however flagrant that was, but his political incompetence. AMLO, the great politician who took advantage of the shortcomings and clumsiness of his predecessor to reach the presidency, never understood what will ultimately defeat him. There, in their mutual arrogance, in their contempt for the citizenry -which did not exist in the world of the sixties or seventies, respectively, in which each of these characters inhabit-, the two presidencies merge. And the consequences will not be entirely different.
Two governments of the old regime in the 21st century will now be replaced by a new generation that will, hopefully, break away from the old ways to project Mexico towards the future.
Peña came to the presidency certain that all his predecessors were incompetent. How was it possible, he surely wondered, that, with so many resources at the disposal of the all-powerful Mexican presidency, the presidents that preceded him had not been able to get the necessary and urgent legislation approved? Beyond the veracity or accuracy of this speculation, there is not the slightest doubt that he undertook to carry out the most ambitious alteration to the constitutional framework since 1917.
All the students who went through the free textbooks of the PRI regime learned that there were three sacrosanct constitutional articles: the third, referring to education; the 27th, referring to the ownership of the resources in the subsoil; and the 123rd, referring to labor and union rights. Although there had been various reforms to these articles over the decades, none compare in ambition and depth to those undertaken by the Peña administration.
What Peña did not understand was that the Mexico of the 21st century required explaining and convincing a skeptical citizenry, that the problem was not merely the constitutional text but the legitimacy among the population of his bills for the progress of the country. Failing to carry out that political task cost him, and the country, a series of good laws that, should they survive AMLO’s final onslaught, will now depend upon the politicized judiciary that emerges. He used an obscure mechanism, the Pact for Mexico, to negotiate in the proverbial smoke-filled room the content of his bills, to later have them approved without any discussion (and with a lot of grease…) in the legislature. The urgent thing was to change the constitutional text, as if what was important, in a country that has seen hundreds of constitutional amendments come and go, was the written word.
The mechanism was pre-modern because it did not correspond to the 21st century world in which Mexico exists today. Certainly, Mexican politics are far from being 100% democratic: according to the polls, only 58% of the people assume themselves as citizens, but their level of information, willingness to debate, and demand to participate in public decisions bears no resemblance to what happened in the 20th century. Only a president rooted in another moment in history, presumably the era of glory of the PRI (the 1960s), could have thought that the problem was “technical,” of merely redrafting the constitutional text.
AMLO is guilty of exactly the same fervor: he wanted to change everything, but, in contrast with Peña, without the technical capacity or slightest concern for end result, so that his achievements are even more modest, but much more pernicious, especially in this, the last month of his administration. Another inhabitant of the 20th century, but of the seventies, AMLO arrived with a mission like that of his predecessor, but in the opposite direction. With a similar zeal and arrogance, as well as ignorance, he devoted himself to eliminating all legislation that hindered his vision of the world: he canceled institutions, eviscerated all counterweights, and did everything possible to recreate his idyllic world of the seventies in which the presidency was almighty. The urgency to modify the legal framework in the last stretch of his presidency leaves a poisoned gift to his successor.
Peña’s mistake was not to socialize the bills that he sent to the legislature, as Salinas had done with such diligence (and success) with NAFTA. Neither he nor his team understood the political significance of the changes that they had promoted, nor did they understand the moment in Mexico or the imperative need to explain and convince the public of the relevance of their initiatives. With absolute arrogance they imposed their vision of the world without worrying about the consequences: without paying attention to the obvious fact that what is easy to approve is also easy to reverse.
AMLO has been a specialist in reversing. De facto and de jure, in reality and on paper, he has dedicated himself to canceling the entire legal and political framework that his predecessors had been building to limit the powers of the presidency and to institutionalize the Mexican government, that is, to build the scaffolding towards an eventual rule of law. Using the powers of the presidency, and AMLO’s extraordinary personal accumulation of power, he imposed his preferences in law, opening the door for a new era of uncertainty and precariousness. Or worse.
The ways followed by Peña and by AMLO are different, but the consequences will be similar. One tried to build towards the future, the other has tried to rebuild the past, but both will see their future disrupted because the Mexico of the 21st century cannot bear that level of irresponsibility, a product of the excess power that the person of the president concentrates and the resources that, although from the Treasury, they have used as if they were their own.
Tough years lie ahead, beginning with the inexorable need to restore harmony, in order to once again restart laying down reliable and credible foundations of institutional solidity.
