MEXICO CITY –
Prior to Mexico’s
just-concluded presidential election, public disaffection with the state of
affairs in the country was palpable. Mexicans from all walks of life seemed
concerned about spiraling violence, anemic economic growth, and the lackluster
rule of the National Action Party (PAN). With 60,000 people killed in the war
on drugs, Mexicans – like Russians following the first chaotic years of
democratic transition under Boris Yeltsin – opted for political regression,
underpinned by nostalgia for rule by a firm, if corrupt, hand.
Mexicans responded accordingly,
punishing the PAN for overseeing an economy that has grown only 1.5% per year
on average over the last 12 years, as well as for a level of insecurity that Mexico
has not witnessed since its revolution 100 years ago. But, perhaps most
importantly, the PRI reaped the benefits of the best investment it has made in
recent years: the permanent publicity campaign that turned its candidate and
now President-elect, Enrique Peña Nieto, into Mexico’s
most popular political figure.
Peña Nieto is a product of the two
television networks that groomed him for power and then propelled him to the
presidency. The PRI’s political strategy was essentially the “golden boy”
model: handsome face, cartloads of money, and the support of the television
networks and Mexico’s
dinosaur elite, which yearned for a return to power. In other words, Peña
Nieto’s rise represents an alliance of oligarchs, vested monopolistic
interests, the forces of order, and a population that has become disillusioned
with electoral democracy.
For many Mexicans, the restoration to
power of a party that governed in an authoritarian manner and returns without having
had to modernize itself, is a cause for neither insomnia nor even concern. They
regard the PRI’s return as if it were a symptom of democratic normalcy, of
“kicking the bums out.” The oracles of optimism predict that the PRI will be
forced to enact the structural reforms that it has blocked time and again over
the years.
It would indeed be fortunate for Mexico
if a new era of PRI presidencies were a sign of healthy rotation in power
rather than a regrettable step backwards. But any reasonable analysis of the
current PRI does not support that prediction, and reveals it to be based on
little more than wishful thinking.
As Tom Friedman has argued, three
groups coexist in Mexico
today: “The Narcos, the No’s, and the NAFTA’s.” These are, respectively, the
drug lords, the beneficiaries of the status quo, and middle-class
Mexicans who want prosperity.
The PRI is, by definition, the party
of “No.” It opposes necessary structural reforms in order to defend its clients’
rent-seeking practices; rejects citizen candidacies in favor of unaccountable
party elites; recoils from union modernization, owing to the corporatist
practices that it implemented; and refuses to dismantle the monopolies that it
established. The PRI and Peña Nieto are “veto centers,” because they constitute
the main opposition to any change that would entail opening, privatizing,
confronting, or remodeling the system that they conceived and now, once again,
control.
The PRI demonstrated in this election
that it had more money, unity, discipline, and hunger for success than its
adversaries. Unfortunately, it continues to be a clientelist, corporatist,
corrupt organization that does not believe in citizen participation, checks and
balances, competition, accountability, or scrutiny of public-sector unions.
Yet the country that the PRI is now
poised to govern again has changed, slowly but surely. Its youth are less
conformist and more demanding, less passive and more pluralistic. It is now the
task of all Mexicans who marched and mobilized and recently took Peña Nieto to
task on the streets to ensure that Putinization remains a Russian phenomenon.
