While it might take days or even weeks before Mexico’s cliff-hanger presidential election is officially settled, it seems almost certain that right-of-center, liberal candidate Felipe Calderón will be the country’s next president. He may not have won by more than a percentage point and his 36% of the vote is hardly a mandate. His opponents will challenge the results in the streets, the courts and the political arena, and he will face a strong, though divided, opposition in Congress. Still, winning is better than losing, and Mexico is better off today than it was yesterday, when many thought the left-of-center populist contender, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, would receive a thumping endorsement from the electorate.
Calderón means continuity; that’s probably why he won, and that is what Mexico needs.
In the end, Mexico’s voters did not fall for López Obrador’s stratagem. His case was simple: Mexico is a basket case today, let’s throw out the rascals responsible for it and replace them with leaders who will represent and help the poor – still half of Mexico’s population.
Regardless of the fact that this description is largely, though not entirely, inaccurate, the voters decided that the last people they wanted to fix the mess were … those who created it in the first place. López Obrador surrounded himself with former high-level officials of the Echeverría (1970-1976), López Portillo (1976-1982), De la Madrid (1982-1988), and Salinas de Gortari administrations. It simply didn’t fly with the electorate.
Conversely, Calderón’s argument did. He basically argued that over the past ten years, Mexico, while hardly a paradise, was on something of a roll: inflation came under control, growth began to pick up, poverty was being reduced, and lower interest rates made credit available to the lower middle class. And all of this came about without repression, human rights violations, uprisings, political assassinations, or runaway corruption.
According to exit polls, 60% of Mexico’s voters who thought that things had improved over the past year voted for Calderón; 60% of those who approve of President Vicente Fox (who in turn has a 65% approval rate), chose Calderón as well. Calderón ran on Fox’s coat-tails, but without any Fox entourage, and he won… big-time.
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Nonetheless the challenges he faces are enormous. Mexico today is victim of a gaping ideological divide that most other countries in Latin America have put behind them. The election was not over policies, simplistic or not, such as war or peace, lower or higher taxes, more or less public spending, how to combat poverty or create jobs, to permit or prohibit capital punishment, abortion, gay marriage, or whatever. The campaign was over Mexico’s soul, over the highly abstract, partly imaginary, broad ideological themes of nationalism, separation of church and state, the market versus the state, law enforcement versus eradicating privilege and poverty, belonging to Latin America or to North America, poor versus rich.
Viewed from afar, such campaign themes might not have been a bad thing: after all, countries need these types of discussion every now and then. But in fact, the discussion was largely meaningless, because the policies that theoretically would have sprung from the electorate favoring one world-view or the other were either unviable or already in place. Calderón cannot hand education over to the Church, privatize Pemex (the state owned oil company) or abolish social anti-poverty programs, as his adversaries falsely claimed he would do. And López Obrador would not have been able to move Mexico away from the United States, revise NAFTA, massively and overnight re-orient public spending, eliminate poverty, and create millions of jobs through unfunded infrastructure programs, as he said, and truly seemed to believe, he would do.
As in most cases, Byzantine ideological debates such as these lead nowhere, but they do crowd out meaningful policy discussions. Since debates over those policies did not take place, they will have to begin now, and inevitably they will further polarize a society that is already deeply divided.
Calderón will not only be plagued by this artificial ideological divide; he will also have to confront the same paralysis that Fox and his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, have encountered since 1997. Mexico’s current institutions were designed and built for an authoritarian rule, not for democracy, and they worked while Mexico was governed by a single party, the PRI. When democracy came, everyone – Zedillo, Fox, this writer, and many more - thought that the same institutions would remain functional, despite a radically different context.
We were all wrong, and the new president must face the same challenge: not how to govern with these dysfunctional institutions, but how to replace them with something that works. This is the single most important challenge facing Calderón; designing and building new institutions should be his first priority.
Achieving, at long last, re-election of parliamentary representatives; calling a referendum to amend the Constitution; creating a hybrid, semi-presidential, semi-parliamentary system that will encourage the formation of legislative majorities in a three-party environment; allowing independent candidates to run for office, thus forcing party realignment; and abolishing the US-style campaign-financing, where air time is purchased instead of allotted, and which led to Sunday’s election probably being, dollar for vote, the most expensive in the world. These are the most important and urgent reforms.
With these reforms, Mexico can finally begin to harvest the fruits of ten years of stability and continuity -- not a mean feat for a country which had previously had major crises in every decade since the 1960s. With the reforms, the urgently needed substantive decisions that will directly affect the lives of the Mexicans -- energy, tax, and labor reform, the improvement of education, and poverty reduction -- can be made. Without the reforms, the country will continue to plod along and, no matter how intensely people may feel about it, real change will remain impossible.
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While it might take days or even weeks before Mexico’s cliff-hanger presidential election is officially settled, it seems almost certain that right-of-center, liberal candidate Felipe Calderón will be the country’s next president. He may not have won by more than a percentage point and his 36% of the vote is hardly a mandate. His opponents will challenge the results in the streets, the courts and the political arena, and he will face a strong, though divided, opposition in Congress. Still, winning is better than losing, and Mexico is better off today than it was yesterday, when many thought the left-of-center populist contender, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, would receive a thumping endorsement from the electorate.
Calderón means continuity; that’s probably why he won, and that is what Mexico needs.
In the end, Mexico’s voters did not fall for López Obrador’s stratagem. His case was simple: Mexico is a basket case today, let’s throw out the rascals responsible for it and replace them with leaders who will represent and help the poor – still half of Mexico’s population.
Regardless of the fact that this description is largely, though not entirely, inaccurate, the voters decided that the last people they wanted to fix the mess were … those who created it in the first place. López Obrador surrounded himself with former high-level officials of the Echeverría (1970-1976), López Portillo (1976-1982), De la Madrid (1982-1988), and Salinas de Gortari administrations. It simply didn’t fly with the electorate.
Conversely, Calderón’s argument did. He basically argued that over the past ten years, Mexico, while hardly a paradise, was on something of a roll: inflation came under control, growth began to pick up, poverty was being reduced, and lower interest rates made credit available to the lower middle class. And all of this came about without repression, human rights violations, uprisings, political assassinations, or runaway corruption.
According to exit polls, 60% of Mexico’s voters who thought that things had improved over the past year voted for Calderón; 60% of those who approve of President Vicente Fox (who in turn has a 65% approval rate), chose Calderón as well. Calderón ran on Fox’s coat-tails, but without any Fox entourage, and he won… big-time.
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Nonetheless the challenges he faces are enormous. Mexico today is victim of a gaping ideological divide that most other countries in Latin America have put behind them. The election was not over policies, simplistic or not, such as war or peace, lower or higher taxes, more or less public spending, how to combat poverty or create jobs, to permit or prohibit capital punishment, abortion, gay marriage, or whatever. The campaign was over Mexico’s soul, over the highly abstract, partly imaginary, broad ideological themes of nationalism, separation of church and state, the market versus the state, law enforcement versus eradicating privilege and poverty, belonging to Latin America or to North America, poor versus rich.
Viewed from afar, such campaign themes might not have been a bad thing: after all, countries need these types of discussion every now and then. But in fact, the discussion was largely meaningless, because the policies that theoretically would have sprung from the electorate favoring one world-view or the other were either unviable or already in place. Calderón cannot hand education over to the Church, privatize Pemex (the state owned oil company) or abolish social anti-poverty programs, as his adversaries falsely claimed he would do. And López Obrador would not have been able to move Mexico away from the United States, revise NAFTA, massively and overnight re-orient public spending, eliminate poverty, and create millions of jobs through unfunded infrastructure programs, as he said, and truly seemed to believe, he would do.
As in most cases, Byzantine ideological debates such as these lead nowhere, but they do crowd out meaningful policy discussions. Since debates over those policies did not take place, they will have to begin now, and inevitably they will further polarize a society that is already deeply divided.
Calderón will not only be plagued by this artificial ideological divide; he will also have to confront the same paralysis that Fox and his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, have encountered since 1997. Mexico’s current institutions were designed and built for an authoritarian rule, not for democracy, and they worked while Mexico was governed by a single party, the PRI. When democracy came, everyone – Zedillo, Fox, this writer, and many more - thought that the same institutions would remain functional, despite a radically different context.
We were all wrong, and the new president must face the same challenge: not how to govern with these dysfunctional institutions, but how to replace them with something that works. This is the single most important challenge facing Calderón; designing and building new institutions should be his first priority.
Achieving, at long last, re-election of parliamentary representatives; calling a referendum to amend the Constitution; creating a hybrid, semi-presidential, semi-parliamentary system that will encourage the formation of legislative majorities in a three-party environment; allowing independent candidates to run for office, thus forcing party realignment; and abolishing the US-style campaign-financing, where air time is purchased instead of allotted, and which led to Sunday’s election probably being, dollar for vote, the most expensive in the world. These are the most important and urgent reforms.
With these reforms, Mexico can finally begin to harvest the fruits of ten years of stability and continuity -- not a mean feat for a country which had previously had major crises in every decade since the 1960s. With the reforms, the urgently needed substantive decisions that will directly affect the lives of the Mexicans -- energy, tax, and labor reform, the improvement of education, and poverty reduction -- can be made. Without the reforms, the country will continue to plod along and, no matter how intensely people may feel about it, real change will remain impossible.