The man the polls keep showing as the favourite for Mexico's next presidential elections, Mexico city mayor Manuel Andrés López Obrador, believes that the progress made so far towards turning the country into a fully working democracy has been dealt a very serious blow. What prompted him was the selection last week of new authorities for the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), the autonomous electoral authority that has so far piloted Mexico's democratisation to almost universal acclaim — save for a spate of irritation from all quarters about recent rulings.
The appointments require approval by a two-thirds' majority in congress. When disagreement over the new IFE council dragged out sessions almost to the moment when the old mandates would expire, a deal was struck between the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) and the opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), with the small Partido Verde Ecologista (PVEM) tagging along. On 1 November the three mustered the necessary votes to appoint a new council headed by Luis Carlos Ugalde Martínez, an academic at the prestigious Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (Cide).
`Agreement between cliques'
Excluded from the deal, and hence from representation, were the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) — López Obrador's party — and the farther-left Partido del Trabajo (PT). López Obrador's verdict: `This is an act of regression in the country's political life. It is not possible that through an agreement between cliques we should pick councillors with partisan interests. It is shameful.'
This found echoes in the media, ranging from the sedately concerned to the vitriolic. El Universal said, `The doubt arises whether [the IFE] might end up dominated by those parties, demolishing any possible improvement in the reliability of the electoral system.' La Jornada ran as its frontpage headline, `Assault on the IFE'. Inside, it gave prominence to a PRD statement saying that `there was a conspiracy to take over the arbiter of the 2006 elections.'
A hard act to follow
The IFE was created in 1990, in response to public outrage over the PRI's conduct of the 1998 elections, when the count was suddenly interrupted due to, as put by interior minister Manuel Bartlett, a failure of the computing system. When it was resumed it showed a suspect, and decisive, advantage for PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari over his PRD rival, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
Under the chairmanship of José Woldenberg, the IFE guaranteed the transparency of a string of elections that spelt the end of the PRI's seven decades of political hegemony. The main landmarks of this process were, in 1997, the PRI's loss of an absolute majority in congress, and the PRD's emergence as the majority in Mexico city, and in 2000, the first defeat of the PRI in presidential elections, to the benefit of the PAN's Vicente Fox. Whatever the grounds for the suspicions being voiced now, the new IFE will find itself operating under very close scrutiny.
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