Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Miami Herald

March 31, 2005

The day after Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, Mexicans awoke brimful of hope. ¡Hoy! ¡Hoy! ¡Hoy!, the crowds had chanted during the campaign when candidate Fox promised to bring down the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The longed for change — el cambio — had finally happened.

Once in office, Fox quickly dissipated the aura of expectation. Public opinion — which still gives him high personal marks — has long considered the president clueless politically. Indeed, Fox has never quite governed as if he understood that power is meant to be wielded with purpose and without pause.

Defeating the PRI was one thing, freeing Mexico from the party’s 72-year stranglehold another one entirely. The 2000 election settled the first; the second still needs no less than a generation of muscular sexenios, the six-year presidential terms. Unfortunately, Fox’s has fallen short.

One thing is certain: Mexico won’t ever get 2001 back, when the administration should have come out swinging against the old order but didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong: Mexico is freer today than ever before. In and of itself, the PRI’s loss of the sinews of state power created a remarkable opportunity to extend freedom. And it was extended — but mostly within the political class. Ordinary citizens still largely lack the power to hold elected officials accountable. No reelection, for example, means that legislators are more beholden to party machineries than to their constituencies. Politicos, thus, have used freedom to jostle among themselves rather than to empower the citizenry.

At the 2003 midterm election, Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) lost, in a drubbing, 54 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and his sexenio was unofficially over. Since then, the 2006 presidential contest has been the lodestar. Under its light, the three major parties — PRI, PAN and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — held party assemblies recently.

o At the PRI’s, Roberto Madrazo kept the opposition to his candidacy in check. With sights on governing anew, the party issued responsible declarations on fiscal and energy reforms.

o At the PAN’s, Fox’s people took over the party establishment. Santiago Creel — front-runner for the nomination — and Marta Sahagún — Fox’s wife and a likely candidate for one office or another — are the power play’s primary beneficiaries.

o At the PRD’s, all eyes were on Mexico City’s mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the party’s presidential candidate if he does not lose the immunity which the mayoralty carries. If he does, he could be charged for violating a court order in a convoluted but relatively minor matter that would disqualify him from the race.

López Obrador’s desafuero — the process whereby the Chamber of Deputies would cancel his immunity — is a major sign of all that has remained unchanged in Mexican politics. The PRI and the PAN are more invested in the desafuero than in passing much-needed economic reforms. That the desafuero is simply about the law is hard to accept. López Obrador is, after all, leading in the presidential race. That the mayor may be an Hugo Chávez is, no doubt, cause for concern. That the PRI and the PAN apparently prefer to disqualify him on a questionable legality instead of facing him at the polls is just as worrisome.

López Obrador has, in fact, used the desafuero brilliantly. Public opinion is even more strongly against it today than six months ago. Without it, his presidential race may not have gathered momentum. If the Chamber of Deputies renders a decision on Friday in favor of the desafuero, massive public protests are sure to follow. A few days in jail would do further wonders for the mayor.

Fox, alas, is no Ernesto Zedillo. The former PRI president did more to modernize Mexican politics, not the least of which was standing statesman-like on the sidelines of the 2000 election.

In contrast, Fox is in the thick of the 2006 contest while dismissing uneasiness about the PRI regaining the presidency. Yet, uneasy we must be: Madrazo is also no Zedillo. If he wins, would he be a Boris Yeltsin or a Vladimir Putin? That the second is at least as likely should not be taken lightly at all.