By Eric Hershberg and Fulton Armstrong
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Preparing for elections in Chiapas, Mexico last week. Photo Credit: Dimitri dF / Flickr / Creative Commons
Mexico’s mid-term elections last Sunday to select governors, mayors, and local and federal legislators confirmed popular engagement in the democratic process, but deep frustration with the country’s political parties. Voter turnout – 47 percent of eligible voters cast ballots – was high despite violence, isolated ballot-burnings, attacks on election board offices, and calls for boycotts. The elections were carried out under highly adverse conditions. Some 1,400 murders were recorded nationwide in April – the highest rate in a year – and a clash between privately supported vigilantes and suspected cartel members left 13 dead in Guerrero state the day before voting. Four assassinated candidates remained on Sunday’s ballots (and at least one won). Pre-election polls showed that some 90 percent of citizens distrusted the political parties, and over half expressed disapproval for President Peña Nieto half-way into his six-year term. According to press reports, voters were motivated by concern about the government’s inability to deal with the resurgence of violence or even satisfactorily explain massacres, such as the disappearance last September of 43 students who were last seen in police custody. Mexico’s sluggish economy may have driven people to the polls as well; the government cut growth estimates in May because of lower than expected oil revenues and U.S. growth.
As predicted, the President’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its partners won a parliamentary majority – winning about 40 percent of the votes and, as a coalition, 260-plus seats in the 500-member Congress. The PRI and the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD) lost governorships in the country’s two most violent states – Guerrero and Michoacán – in what’s widely seen as a rebuke to both. The opposition National Action Party (PAN) held largely steady, garnering about 20 percent of the votes. By most accounts, the big winner on Sunday is Governor-elect Jaime Rodríguez of Mexico’s second-richest state, Nuevo León. Running as an outsider, El Bronco took advantage of an electoral reform allowing independent candidacies and waltzed to victory with 48 percent of the vote despite a modest campaign and opposition from local media. He has pledged that his election marks “the start of a second Mexican Revolution.”
El Bronco can legitimately claim to embody rejection of the traditional parties, and in that respect his rise to prominence is not unlike that of many charismatic politicians in Latin America’s recent and not-so-recent past. Given his campaign’s lack of programmatic clarity, it is not clear that he or the votes cast in his favor represent anything more than that. President Peña Nieto achieved important reforms during his first three years in office, particularly in energy and education, but these have neither generated enthusiastic support nor their anticipated benefits. Whether the President has any new compelling ideas to offer for the remainder of his term remains to be seen. The relatively high turnout last Sunday despite popular cynicism toward the parties and myriad security challenges does testify to Mexicans’ resilient democratic aspirations, but the election also reflects widespread public disillusion with the available options – incumbent as well as opposition. The ruling PRI failed to offer (or even project) a credible agenda for Mexico during what are clearly times of trouble, and the country suffers from a lack of coherent alternative visions for either conservative modernization (the PAN) or progressive transformation (PRD or its former standard-bearer, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with his newly established Morena party). Across the ideological spectrum, Mexico’s politics are stuck, and it’s going to take more than one Bronco to drive out the dinosaurs.
June 11, 2015
Tagged: Democracy, Drug Trafficking, Economy, Education, Elections, López Obrador, Mexico, Nuevo León, PAN, Peña Nieto, PRD, PRI, Rodríguez (Jaime) Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
