Mexico & Nafta
Expect 2005 to be a difficult year for the country. It is a pre-election year, so the electoral jockeying and elbowing will be particularly vicious: what happened to the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in 2004 is probably only a dry run of the dirty tricks in store for other candidates in 2005. This electoral jockeying will probably take place against the backdrop of a spluttering economy: oil prices may well weaken. The effect of this will be compounded by a slowdown in the US and a weak US dollar.
The presidential elections of July 2006 are only 19 months away. The change of government in December 2006 is now less than two years away. Just as it was at this point in the previous administration, it is far from clear who will win the election. What is clear is that whoever it is will not have a majority in congress.
The frontrunner for the presidency must be Roberto Madrazo, the president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. He is likely to be the PRI's presidential candidate. He lost the primary for the PRI presidential nomination in 1999. A recent opinion poll, in Reforma, found that although Madrazo was the third-most popular candidate, the highest proportion of voters (36%) thought that the PRI would win in 2006. As we note inside, the PRI has had a terrific year in the gubernatorial and other elections held in 2004, winning seven of the 10 contests.
Next year may prove more difficult for the PRI electorally. The key election in 2005 is in the Estado de México, the country's richest and electorally most important state. The PRI is making a mess of picking its candidate for the July election: it is very likely the party in the state will split over the choice. As the state is already pretty evenly divided between the three main parties, both the Partido Acción Nacional and the Partido de la Revolución Democratica quietly fancy their chances.
The Estado is also a tricky contest for the PRI because the existing fissures in the party run through the state. Madrazo's deputy, Elba Esther Gordillo, has a strong position in the state. If she does not approve of the candidate the party chooses, or if one of her allies breaks with the party, she may well try to exacerbate the problem by breaking with Madrazo. Gordillo's powerbase is the 1m strong teachers' union (the SNTE). Its branch network gives Gordillo the basis for a national party.
Gordillo can probably count on the support of at least 50 of the PRI's 223 members of congress. So far her flirtation with the PAN, first in congress and then in gubernatorial elections in Aguascalientes has not been decisive. Almost certainly she will have to raise the stakes in the Estado or drop out of the game.
The PRI is not the only party with the potential to split in factions which will diminish the party's overall influence. The leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática is probably even more divided.
The PRD has Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the most popular candidate for the presidency, according to the opinion polls. López Obrador is the mayor of Mexico City and, with one exception, has headed the opinion polls for the presidency ever since they started being run a year ago. The problem for him and the PRD is that his popularity has been sliding for most of 2004. This may be a result of what López Obrador claims is a dirty tricks campaign waged against him by the federal government. More worryingly for him the slide may also be the result of growing unhappiness at the way Mexico City has been run.
There are two main challengers to López Obrador's command of, and candidature for, the PRD. One comes from the radical direct-action wing of the party, headed by René Bejarano. He was López Obrador's private secretary and in November became the first politician for over 20 years to be stripped of his parliamentary immunity by congress. Bejarano, who led the PRD in Mexico City's assembly, is now in custody. He is accused of taking bribes from Carlos Ahumada, a dodgy Argentine-born property developer. Bejarano forms a powerful political axis with his wife, Dolores Padierna, a PRD federal deputy. Padierna halted sessions of congress in October in an attempt to stop Mexico City's budget being cut.
López Obrador has, so far, failed to come to the help of Bejarano. This lack of support is diminishing López Obrador's standing with Bejarano's Izquierda Democrática Nacional wing of the PRD. The case against Bejarano looks overwhelming. Videos of him stuffing his pockets with Ahumada's dollars were broadcast on national TV.
The other challenge to López Obrador comes from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the PRD's traditional presidential candidate. He is as well known, nationally, as López Obrador, but speaks for a different sort of perredista. López Obrador is in tune with (some) of the metropolitan elite whereas Cárdenas represents social and peasant activists who have struggled for years. Cárdenas also has the magic of his name: he is the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, the Revolutionary general who became president and nationalised the foreign oil companies in 1938. President Cárdenas laid the foundations for the PRI's two generations of political hegemony. Some Priístas now see virtues in Cárdenas that they did not perceive in 2000. Cuauhtémoc has run for the presidency in every election since 1988: he was almost certainly cheated out of victory in 1988.
The realistic competitors for the PAN nomination are, so far, the most numerous. There are four declared candidates: Santiago Creel, the interior minister; Luis Ernesto Derbez, the foreign minister; Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, a former party president and energy minister; and Carlos Medina Plascencia, a federal senator. The opinion polls have Creel well ahead of the rest. Derbez is a dark horse: few people suspected that he had presidential ambitions until he announced them at the end of November in an interview with Reforma. About 10 days later, in a wide-ranging interview with the same newspaper on 5 December, Calderón made a bold move for the middle-ground. He said that he would try to establish a working relationship with congress by bringing in politicians who had clout in congress into his cabinet. The subtext of Calderón's statement is that President Fox squandered his opportunities by failing to sort out a way of getting his reforming legislation through congress. Finding a way of working with congress, in which none of the three main parties has a majority, is likely to be the biggest task facing whoever is elected president in 2006.