| The End of Reform in Mexico |
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| By Mark Falcoff |
| Posted: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 |
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| LATIN AMERICAN OUTLOOK |
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AEI Online
(Washington)
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| Publication Date: August 1, 2003 |
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Mexico's midterm elections on Sunday, July 6, produced results sufficiently ambiguous to fuel debate over their significance. On one hand, President Vicente Fox's party, PAN, lost a quarter of its seats in the 500-member Chamber of Deputies, while both opposition parties--the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD)--both gained ground (the latter actually doubling its representation). On the other hand, two qualifiers need to be borne in mind. One is that a record 60 percent of voters did not participate, which suggests that Mexicans were turning their backs not just on Fox or his party but on politics and politicians in general. The other is that when the actual percentages are broken down, all three parties are roughly where they were, not merely during the presidential race in 2000, but even in the last midterm congressional elections in 1997.
Concretely, PAN's 31 percent this time was less than two percentage points different from its vote in 2000; it bears recalling here that what pushed Fox over the top three years ago were alliances with other parties and a strong dose of support from independents determined to end the seventy-year monopoly of the PRI. Both of these forces have since migrated elsewhere or out of political activity altogether. As for the PRI, its 34.4 percent this year was actually less than its 36.9 percent in 2000--a year when it suffered its first defeat ever in a presidential election. Likewise, while the PRD may celebrate its boost in representation, the ninety-nine seats it won this year still put it well below the 125 it secured in 1997. (Its 17 percent of this year's vote was only a percentage point less than what it received in 2000.)
At the very least, however, President Fox must accept the outcome as something of a vote of no confidence in his leadership. To some degree this was to be expected; he came to power three years ago on a wave of expectations that probably no president could begin to satisfy--including pledges to create a million new jobs and to conclude a migration agreement with the United States, which, if enacted, would presumably have mopped up much of Mexico's unemployment. Instead, heightened security concerns in the United States since September 11, 2001, have postponed any serious discussion of a migration agreement, and a three-year dip on Wall Street has had a pronounced impact on Mexico, where economic performance is strongly tied to the U.S. economy. Specifically, Mexico's economy actually contracted by 0.3 percent in 2001 and grew at a mediocre 0.9 percent last year; for 2003, it will probably reach no higher than 2 percent. According to some estimates, slightly more than one out of two Mexicans are poor and, unless robust economic growth resumes, have little prospect of improving their lot.
Granted that no Mexican president can control the economic performance of the United States, it is still true that Fox has wasted much of his first three years. His original plans included broadening the country's tax base, privatizing its electric utilities, and overhauling rigid labor laws. All of these reforms--and many more--have been stalled in Congress. In many ways this is not surprising. Fox is the first Mexican president in more than seventy years to lack a working legislative majority, but more important still, the opposition, though divided by party identification, shares a common statist ideology. Indeed, the PRD is nothing more than the left-wing of the pre-1989 PRI, which split and formed a new party when its idol, Michoacán governor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, failed to get the PRI's presidential nomination. Whatever their other disagreements, the PRI and the PRD share a common resistance to economic reform and neither has much interest, to say the least, in demonstrating the dynamic potential of market-based innovations.
It is also possible that Fox himself is suffering a mild crisis of ideological identity. Because of his former career as a businessman and because he headed the Mexican division of Coca-Cola before entering politics, he has always had to fight off the suggestion that he is excessively "right-wing" and "pro-Yanqui." (This in spite of the fact that in the run-up to his presidential race he even became associated with the Sao Paulo Forum, a left-of-center policy organization, and received support in 2000 from many left-wing groups.) As Mexican partisan politics have become increasingly nasty these last three years, he has been tempted more than once to recur to the gringo-baiting, populist rhetoric that was (and to some degree remains) the trademark of the PRI. If that, however, is what Mexicans are to be offered, they do not need a defective imitation--they can go directly to the masters of the art.
Real Party Competition
Though the actual percentages resulting from this election are not very different from those of three or even six years ago, one thing is new: Mexico is now developing a increasingly competitive party system--one in which the PRI, long regarded as a dinosaur headed for extinction, has demonstrated remarkable potential for recuperation. It remains the first minority in the Chamber of Deputies and is the leading political force in twenty of Mexico's thirty-one states (excluding the Federal District, of which more below). In this particular election it even won the most votes in several states that had PAN governors (Jalisco, Nuevo León, Yucatán) and one (Tlaxcala) ruled by the PRD. On the other hand--here again, emphasizing the growing competitive nature of the system-it failed to win the largest number of votes in three of seventeen states where it presently governs--Colima, San Luis Potosí, and Sonora. Meanwhile, the PAN increased its vote to a majority in eight states. The PRD-which has stagnated in the high teens for many years--gained only in areas already under its control--Michoacán, Zacatecas, Baja California Sur, and above all, the Federal District (Mexico City).
What is remarkable is the degree to which the PRI--discredited by decades of corruption and a catastrophic financial crisis in 1994 and 1995, one from which most Mexicans have not yet recovered--continues to be the party of choice for a significant plurality. Mexican political sociology explains why. As Luis Hernández Navarro observed in the Mexico City daily La Jornada (July 7), "the[se] elections show that the PRI is not only a party but also a part of a political culture deeply rooted in the population and in our social institutions. Clientelism and the exchange of favors for votes remain the dominant political tools in dealing with vast sectors of our poorer population."
Although an astounding 90 percent of Mexico's exports to the United States are manufactured goods, it is also true that a good quarter of the country's population still lives in rural areas. It is here that the PRI continues to play a crucial role--providing money and equipment for small business enterprises, mortgages to members of teacher's unions, land to peasant associations, even free health care for workers. In exchange it demands complete loyalty, "either coopting its opponents or violently wiping them out in a system of intimidation intended to produce a nation of followers rather than leaders." (New York Times, July 9). The PAN neither possesses nor even aspires to possess such a network, and indeed in many ways Fox's vision of a modern Mexico would preclude it. For that vision to be realized, however, requires vast changes in the way that the country is governed and the way it expends it resources. Without a working majority, Fox is likely to drift along these next three years without much to show for his efforts.
Jockeying for 2006
Indeed, many Mexican commentators have virtually written off the rest of Fox's presidency and focused instead on the 2006 presidential race, which they believe began the morning after these by-elections. To be sure, the PRI has not even decided how it will choose its nominee, and many predict a bruising fight involving party chairman Roberto Madrazo (former governor of Tabasco), who makes no secret of his own ambitions, and several state governors, including José Natividad González Paras of Nuevo León, just elected in what was hitherto a PAN stronghold.
The PAN's choice for Fox's successor is an even murkier question, partly due to the party's extremely diverse ideological currents and partly due to the failure so far of any governor to rise to national prominence or suggest the possibility of waging a nationally competitive campaign.
Meanwhile, many in the PRD are pinning their hopes on a new, dynamic face--Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City. Though barely fifty years old, he has spent virtually his entire adult life in politics. He began by organizing Indian communities on Mexico's Pacific coast for the PRI, defecting to the newly formed PRD in 1989. He won the mayorship of the capital in 2000, which until a couple years before had been an appointive rather than elected office.
At present he enjoys an unheard-of 80 percent approval rating among his constituents, due to his energetic personal style and the fact that he is seen as the Mexican politician most unlike Vicente Fox. He arrives to work at 6:00 every morning, dressed modestly and usually driving his own ordinary sedan. Whereas Fox keeps a tight rein on public spending, López Obrador has built new roads and parks, installed new street lights, renovated the city's rickety bus fleet, and restored the city's historic downtown center. He has even found a way to convince rich entrepreneurs to help finance high visibility projects, like a highway extension that will make it easier for middle- and upper-class Mexicans to get to work in the morning. As if that were not enough, he also provides a $60 monthly payment to every resident over the age of seventy. The president has become known for his expansive but unfulfilled promises; López Obrador is seen as a man who can "get things done."
Critics say that the PRD mayor is threatening to push the country into bankruptcy, and some also point with concern to his curious alliance with Carlos Slim Jr., listed by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest men in Latin America. Even his allies wonder if he can be nationally competitive as the candidate of a party wedded to an ideology that, in practice, at least, he does not seem to fully share. (As it is, the PRD is strong only in the capital and in a handful of southern states, polling no higher than 20 percent even in the best of those cases.) Moreover, former governor (and mayor) Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who has run unsuccessfully for the presidency on the PRD ticket three times, is making noises about wanting to run again. If this happens, he might well split the party or force López Obrador to run as an independent.
Fox in a Box
It may be too early to count President Fox out, but to make a difference he will have to summon political skills he has not displayed up to now. The business community is urging him to return to his original reform program, but he seems disinclined to do so, and for good reasons. Fox's problem can be stated quite simply: To change Mexico, he needs a decisive mandate at the ballot box. This he has never received. His victory three years ago was probably largely due to his identification as the "not-PRI" candidate. He would have needed good luck (continuation of an economic boom in the United States, a generous migration agreement with the Bush administration) to advance beyond the victory he cobbled together in 2000. In many ways he is a victim of a vicious circle--Mexico cannot progress without making drastic changes in the way it is organized as a society, but without a decisive turn in the electorate this is not likely to happen; the persistence of the PRI as the country's strongest political force all but guarantees that this turn will not occur, or at least not any time soon.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI. |
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