Dream on
The government is talking up the prospects of getting its four key reforms through congress. Few political commentators believe that congress will approve them either quickly or in any form resembling that in which they will be submitted by the government. The reforms are in four areas — electricity; fiscal; labour, and the state. The government has chosen electricity as the reform to try for first.
The big obstacle for the government is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The party is the biggest in congress, with 222 of the 500 seats in the lower chamber. The PRI contains a hard-core, in both the lower chamber and in the senate, opposed to any change in the constitution, which enshrines state control of the industry.
The government confronted the PRI head on: it sent its two senior people responsible for energy reform to the headquarters of the PRI to explain its plans. The people dispatched were the energy minister (and prominent member of the Partido Acción Nacional), Felipe Calderón, and the apolitical director for the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, Alfredo Elías Ayub. They spent four hours explaining the government's proposals to priístas.
Their time could have been better spent: the arch-opponent of any change, senator Manuel Bartlett, dismissed their new proposal as `the same cat, but turned over'. Days before, Bartlett had drawn up a senate resolution in partnership with Laura Alicia Garza Galindo. Bartlett is a quintessential PRI dinosaur: notorious for presiding over the computer breakdown in 1988 which probably deprived Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the presidency in the closely-fought election of that year. Bartlett is now head of the senate commission on constitutional issues; Garza Galindo is in charge of the senate subcommittee that has been analysing reforms to the electricity industry.
The resolution would commit the senate to opposing any proposal by the government to tinker with Articles 27 and 28 of the constitution, which guarantee state ownership of the electricity industry.
The senate resolution is powerfully worded. It accuses the government and its supporters of compromising on national security and using erroneous and exaggerated figures. The senators argue that the government's plan to create an electricity market is flawed because it draws on exaggerated and inconsistent statistics. They accuse Fox of reverting to what happened under President Zedillo and of exaggerating the risk of the country running into a shortage of electricity generating and distribution capacity if nothing was done. Zedillo also wanted to reform the electricity industry, but was unable to make any headway and left the issue to his successor.
The PRI senators are due to discuss the issue on 22 October. The PRI has 60 of the 128 senate seats. The leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) has 15 and the other small parties another seven, so there is, potentially, quite a hefty anti-privatisation bloc.
In the lower chamber
The strong anti-privatisation line coming out of the senate is at odds with the more conciliatory line from the PRI leadership in the lower chamber. Here, Elba Esther Gordillo, the party's number two and leader in the Cámara de Diputados, has taken part in talks with Fox and his ministers about ways to reform the constitution, especially in regard to electricity.
What is not clear is whether she has the support inside the party, and in the chamber. She is racking up enemies through her determination to exert patronage: she is widely seen to have been the godmother in allocating influential committee chairmanships to her supporters and blocking applications from more independent-minded priístas. She blocked, for example, a former interior minister, Emilio Chuayffet, from becoming chairman of the constitutional committee and got one of her lieutenants, Miguel Angel Yunes, appointed instead. Chuayffet, who is close to the heart of the party machine in the important state of Estado de México, is a dangerous man to have snubbed.
Gordillo already has poor relations with the governor of the Estado, Arturo Montiel. Besides politicians produced by the Estado machine, known as the Grupo Atlacomulco, Gordillo has also annoyed important priístas from other parts of the country, notably Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the former governor of Sonora. One of Beltrones's protégés, Alejandro Moreno, head of the PRI's youth movement, the Frente Juvenil Revolucionario, was upset not to have been made chairman of the chamber's youth affairs committee. Moreno's reaction has been to invite Bartlett to talk to the lower chamber about his opposition to electricity industry reform and organise a nationwide tour for Bartlett to highlight the dangers of the government's proposals.
Crucially, Gordillo's distribution of committee chairmanships among priístas snubbed her nominal boss, Roberto Madrazo, the president of the PRI. Originally, Gordillo was not going to give Madrazo's supporters anything. Three of them said, mockingly, that that they had three drawbacks: they were priístas, madracistas and experts in the committee areas, so of course they were clearly unappointable. Madrazo made a call to Gordillo late in the day and did manage to salvage something for them, but his supporters are still feeling bruised.
So far, Madrazo has been comparatively open-minded about the government's proposals, saying that he was prepared to judge them on their merits. Gordillo's insubordination may mean that he will have to retaliate and swing the party against the reforms, if only to show who is really in charge of the party.
The technocrats
The more technocratic wing of the PRI is sympathetic to the government's reforms, but it will have an uphill battle convincing the rest of the party that they will work. What is significant is that the prominent priístas (Madrazo, Bartlett and Gordillo) are all old-style populist politicians. Even moderate senators, such as Oscar Cantón Zetina, said that there would not be a national convention to discuss the issue: he was sure that the bulk of the population did not want energy privatised and that the PRI would reflect the national view.
The big obstacle for the government is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). The party is the biggest in congress, with 222 of the 500 seats in the lower chamber. The PRI contains a hard-core, in both the lower chamber and in the senate, opposed to any change in the constitution, which enshrines state control of the industry.
The government confronted the PRI head on: it sent its two senior people responsible for energy reform to the headquarters of the PRI to explain its plans. The people dispatched were the energy minister (and prominent member of the Partido Acción Nacional), Felipe Calderón, and the apolitical director for the Comisión Federal de Electricidad, Alfredo Elías Ayub. They spent four hours explaining the government's proposals to priístas.
Their time could have been better spent: the arch-opponent of any change, senator Manuel Bartlett, dismissed their new proposal as `the same cat, but turned over'. Days before, Bartlett had drawn up a senate resolution in partnership with Laura Alicia Garza Galindo. Bartlett is a quintessential PRI dinosaur: notorious for presiding over the computer breakdown in 1988 which probably deprived Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the presidency in the closely-fought election of that year. Bartlett is now head of the senate commission on constitutional issues; Garza Galindo is in charge of the senate subcommittee that has been analysing reforms to the electricity industry.
The resolution would commit the senate to opposing any proposal by the government to tinker with Articles 27 and 28 of the constitution, which guarantee state ownership of the electricity industry.
The senate resolution is powerfully worded. It accuses the government and its supporters of compromising on national security and using erroneous and exaggerated figures. The senators argue that the government's plan to create an electricity market is flawed because it draws on exaggerated and inconsistent statistics. They accuse Fox of reverting to what happened under President Zedillo and of exaggerating the risk of the country running into a shortage of electricity generating and distribution capacity if nothing was done. Zedillo also wanted to reform the electricity industry, but was unable to make any headway and left the issue to his successor.
The PRI senators are due to discuss the issue on 22 October. The PRI has 60 of the 128 senate seats. The leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) has 15 and the other small parties another seven, so there is, potentially, quite a hefty anti-privatisation bloc.
In the lower chamber
The strong anti-privatisation line coming out of the senate is at odds with the more conciliatory line from the PRI leadership in the lower chamber. Here, Elba Esther Gordillo, the party's number two and leader in the Cámara de Diputados, has taken part in talks with Fox and his ministers about ways to reform the constitution, especially in regard to electricity.
What is not clear is whether she has the support inside the party, and in the chamber. She is racking up enemies through her determination to exert patronage: she is widely seen to have been the godmother in allocating influential committee chairmanships to her supporters and blocking applications from more independent-minded priístas. She blocked, for example, a former interior minister, Emilio Chuayffet, from becoming chairman of the constitutional committee and got one of her lieutenants, Miguel Angel Yunes, appointed instead. Chuayffet, who is close to the heart of the party machine in the important state of Estado de México, is a dangerous man to have snubbed.
Gordillo already has poor relations with the governor of the Estado, Arturo Montiel. Besides politicians produced by the Estado machine, known as the Grupo Atlacomulco, Gordillo has also annoyed important priístas from other parts of the country, notably Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the former governor of Sonora. One of Beltrones's protégés, Alejandro Moreno, head of the PRI's youth movement, the Frente Juvenil Revolucionario, was upset not to have been made chairman of the chamber's youth affairs committee. Moreno's reaction has been to invite Bartlett to talk to the lower chamber about his opposition to electricity industry reform and organise a nationwide tour for Bartlett to highlight the dangers of the government's proposals.
Crucially, Gordillo's distribution of committee chairmanships among priístas snubbed her nominal boss, Roberto Madrazo, the president of the PRI. Originally, Gordillo was not going to give Madrazo's supporters anything. Three of them said, mockingly, that that they had three drawbacks: they were priístas, madracistas and experts in the committee areas, so of course they were clearly unappointable. Madrazo made a call to Gordillo late in the day and did manage to salvage something for them, but his supporters are still feeling bruised.
So far, Madrazo has been comparatively open-minded about the government's proposals, saying that he was prepared to judge them on their merits. Gordillo's insubordination may mean that he will have to retaliate and swing the party against the reforms, if only to show who is really in charge of the party.
The technocrats
The more technocratic wing of the PRI is sympathetic to the government's reforms, but it will have an uphill battle convincing the rest of the party that they will work. What is significant is that the prominent priístas (Madrazo, Bartlett and Gordillo) are all old-style populist politicians. Even moderate senators, such as Oscar Cantón Zetina, said that there would not be a national convention to discuss the issue: he was sure that the bulk of the population did not want energy privatised and that the PRI would reflect the national view.