As Mexico gears up for presidential elections in July, things are not looking good for President Felipe Calderón and his ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). The traditional Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years until its historic defeat in 2000, is set to make a remarkable comeback. The political resurgence of the PRI is a damning assessment of the Calderón years.
The perception of failure surrounding the Calderón administration has a lot to do with the president’s declared ‘war’ on drugs and the violence and insecurity it has unleashed. But it is also related to the administration’s meagre policy achievements in other areas, including economic growth, which was the central plank of Calderón’s campaign when he was running for president. This has been a disappointing sexenio (six year term). In aggregate, the outgoing president will leave Mexico in worse shape than he found it – and an electorate that is deeply disillusioned with the country’s dysfunctional political system. The analysis below seeks to understand how and why.
The search for legitimacy and the war on drugs
Calderón came to power in 2006 after winning the presidential election by the narrowest of margins, 233,831 votes, out of 41m valid ballots. It was a bitterly contested race and there were widespread concerns of bias and flaws in the electoral system, reminiscent of the old PRI days. Even the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación, Mexico’s highest electoral court, conceded that the playing field in the run up to the election had not been levelled, and that there had been improper incursions by the-then president Vicente Fox (2000-2006), of the PAN, in favour of Calderón. The runner-up Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City (2000-2005) and candidate for the left-wing the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), refused to recognise the results and set up an ‘alternative government’ instead.
Upon taking office, Calderón thus found himself facing a deeply polarised population, with the credibility of his mandate hanging in the balance. Like other presidents before him who came to power under a shadow of suspicion and distrust, including Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988 and his successor Ernesto Zedillo in 1994, Calderón’s immediate challenge was to build the legitimacy of his rule. Salinas sought to do this through by negotiating the (1994) North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) with Canada and the US that would purportedly bring Mexico into the First World. Zedillo, for his part, launched an ambitious project of political decentralisation intended to divest power, resources and authority. For Calderón, the lynchpin of his search for legitimacy became the war on drugs and organised crime, which he launched immediately upon taking office in December 2006. From the moment Calderón first sent troops to the state of Michoacán (which, incidentally, was governed by the PRD at the time) in late 2006, the war on Mexico’s formidable drug trafficking organisations became the flagship of his administration.
Calderón’s bold gambit seemed to pay off – at least in the short term. The war on drugs provided a critical rallying point around which all Mexicans could unite to fight against a common enemy that threatened to undermine Mexico’s stability, political institutions and very social fabric. But it also proved a remarkably short sighted move on which to stake the whole of a presidency. Over the past five years it has become evident that the Calderón administration is ill-equipped to fight this war effectively and to deal with its fallout. As multiple security experts have pointed out, Calderón launched into the ‘war’ without a sound understanding of the nature of the enemy, adequate planning, or a clear exit strategy. While the war has so far shown very little in terms of results, its social costs have been staggering. It has claimed roughly 50,000 dead and has led to spiralling violence and insecurity in many different parts of the country. The rule of law has been a prime casualty, and impunity reigns throughout. There are also concerns that the Calderón administration has remained indifferent towards the escalation of human rights violations at the hands of both the police and the military.
There is a growing sense amongst the population that Mexico cannot win the war, at least not in the way it is currently being fought. This does not mean that the solution is to return to the tacit accommodation of the past, as the government likes to insinuate of those who are critical of its approach. But it does mean that there is a need for a radical rethinking of the strategy to combat drug trafficking, which is not easy, especially given the sensitivities in the US. Tellingly, all four 2012 presidential candidates agree that the situation cannot continue as it is, because it is untenable, yet none of them have a different strategy to offer.
Limited progress on campaign promises
Of course, it is also essential to keep in mind that there is more to Mexico than this war and that Mexico is far from turning into the failing or failed state that is often portrayed in the international media and policy circles. On the other hand, part of the problem has been that the Calderón administration has focused on this issue with obstinate single-mindedness. This sexenio has offered little else in the form of an alternative discourse focused on other national priorities, while the president himself has displayed a remarkable reluctance to admit fault or describe in honest terms the state of his signature initiative.
Progress on other areas of key importance to the country has remained limited. This is particularly the case in terms of economic growth and job creation, which was the cornerstone of Calderón’s presidential campaign (if not of his actual administration). Admittedly, the middle class has continued to grow in Mexico, and has access to greater opportunities (e.g. housing and credit) and higher standards of living. This has been an ongoing trend since the days of the Fox administration and has been sustained over the past six years. In addition, targeted anti-poverty programmes, notably the conditional cash transfer programmes known as Oportunidades, have been expanded, and there have also been limited investments in infrastructure. Other countries in the region, notably the Southern Cone commodity exporters, led by Brazil, have enjoyed much faster growth in recent years and on the back of this have made big inroads into overall poverty levels (which were higher than in Mexico). Poverty and other leading social indicators in Mexico have not matched the same rapid pace of improvement since 2006, but neither has earlier progress been reversed.
In contrast to the Southern Cone, in Mexico economic growth remains heavily bound up, for good and ill, with the fortunes of its main trade and investment partner, the US. President Calderón has made much of the fact that his administration navigated successfully the global crisis that that began in September 2008. While it is true that the country’s economy has bounced back strongly from the global crisis, it has still underperformed in comparison to its emerging market peers, despite the fact that oil prices have been at an all-time high. Under Calderón, real GDP growth will have averaged just 1.5% annually (from 2007 to 2012 inclusive, based on officially forecast growth of about 3.6% this year). That is simply not enough to promote the kind of job generation the country needs, especially given its large young population. Nor has it provided the resources necessary to take care of other vital social needs, including security and education.
In addition, there has been very little progress in promoting structural reform within the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), and the big national monopolies, while corruption remains endemic. The latest scandal regarding the graft that enabled Wal-Mart’s astonishing expansion in Mexico is a stark reminder of this. Mexico seems to have acquired a reputation, especially at the international level, that there is a lack of commitment from the top to follow through on reforms, and under his sexenio Calderón was not able to do enough to alter that perception.
An immature political system
Calderón’s woes have been exacerbated by a democratic political system that remains immature, in part due to legacies from one-party rule. The “winner-takes-all” mentality that the old system was built on remains alive and well. The three major political parties, the PAN, the PRI and the PRD, seem to be consumed with electoral politics and the need to win the next contest (be it at the municipal, state or national level), above and beyond any concern with the national interest, and this has generated a fiercely competitive and often acrimonious dynamic between them. As a result, the parties have failed to develop any kind of basic agreement on how they might work together to address the multiple challenges that beset Mexico. The divisions among them are not purely ideological (they adroitly manage to build strategic electoral coalitions when it seems to suits), but also calculated and interest-driven. Their refusal to collaborate across party lines and to build consensus has kept Mexico in a state of governmental gridlock since the advent of democratic rule.
As a result, much of Calderón’s legislative agenda has been stalled, blocked or diluted beyond recognition. This happened, for example, with proposed reforms to the energy sector. Attempts to reform the political system have yielded little more than a narrow electoral reform that is considered deeply unsatisfactory and even problematic, because it seems to have strengthened the established political parties even more. And almost six years into the war on drugs, important laws to reform the police and the judiciary have yet to materialise.
An enormous challenge here is that there is no re-election – another legacy from Mexico’s single-party rule past. This poses a fundamental problem: because politicians depend on party bosses rather than on voters for their political future, they tend to be much more accountable to their party than to the electorate. Among other things, this makes it difficult to build coalitions across parties in congress, because it behoves representatives to toe the party line. Unions, another integral part of the political system under one-party rule, remain extremely powerful in Mexico and are often opposed to reform. Given their ability to mobilise votes, they continue to hold sway over politicians, and as such they have held considerable veto power over important reforms, notably in the oil and education sectors.
- Where to from here?
The legacies of this sexenio are daunting. There is a fundamental lack of trust and confidence in government and in the political process more generally, which remains deeply dysfunctional. According to Consulta Mitofsky, Mexico's most trustworthy pollsters, only 30% of the voting public believe that the country is headed in the right direction.
- Support for democracy
A poll conducted by Vanderbilt University for the Latin American Public Opinion Project found that public satisfaction with democracy in Mexico dropped to just 40.6% in 2010, from 50.3% in 2004. This is a worrisome trend. Mexico gives many reasons for hope in the resilience of its institutions and its people, but it is not clear that things can be easily improved in the next six years. Unless the leading 2012 presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto (of the PRI), is a Gorbachev-type figure committed to deep-rooted structural and institutional reforms, it is not likely that patterns of corruption and paternalism will change substantially. But neither is it apparent that the other two main candidates, Josefina Vázquez Mota of the PAN and López Obrador (running again for a PRD-led coalition), have anything different and innovative to offer. The struggle for change in Mexico will be long and arduous, especially against the backdrop of drug-related violence and insecurity – and everyone, including the US, has a stake in the process.
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