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Still the Party-State?


Just reading John Ackerman essay in Proceso this morning on how the Mexican Federal Election Commission has certified that two minor candidates - Jaime Rodriquez Calderon or "El Bronco", the governor of Nuevo Leon, and Margarita Zavala, the wife of former president Calderon - were added to the presidential ballot in spite of their failure to gather enough signatures and the irregularities associated with the signatures they collected. Ackerman draws two conclusions from these decisions. First, these minor candidates will take votes away from Andres Manual Lopez Portillo (or AMLO), the current front runner in Mexico's presidential elections, and second, there is a block of four judges in the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federacion (TEPJF), who may be prepared to overturn the results of the 2018 elections in order to keep AMLO from coming to power. Here is a link to the essay: https://www.proceso.com.mx/530781/estalinismo-electoral.

Just a bit of background to all of this. Ernesto Zedillo, the president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, implemented democratic reforms which included establishing the autonomy of the judiciary and Federal Electoral Commission of which the TEPJF forms a part.  Until that point, the Electoral Commission answered to the Ministry of the Interior.  This reform came on the heels of the 1988 presidential campaign in which the challenger to the PRI candidate, Cuautemoc Cardenas, took an early lead in the counting of the ballots. Then the Commission announced that the computers it was using to tabulate the vote had broken down. Days later, the PRI candidate, Salinas de Gortari, was declared the victor. Salinas took power and implemented structural adjustment reforms that were widely unpopular, which Cardenas had dismissed as "el entreguismo" (or handing the country over to foreigners). The key point here is the outcome of the election reflected the nature of the Mexican state after decades of PRI rule - it had become a party-state, that is, a state in which the dominant party controls all the organs of the state and is able to eliminate the emergence of challenges, like Cardenas'.

Mexico's much heralded transition to democracy was supposed to have dismantled the structures of the party state. In my view, this seems uncertain. What has happened politically in Mexico since 2000 has been an alternation of power between the PRI and PAN parties with the political left being kept from power and also subject to repression.  In 2018, AMLO is the candidate of the left. He has sprinted out to an astounding 20 point in polls in a field of three major candidates and numerous minor candidates. The question that Ackerman is raising is whether Mexico is still a party-state - or, at least, an anti-democratic state which will ignore the outcomes of the popular vote in order to protect the interests of the existing political and economic elite. The decisions in the case of "el Bronco" and Zavala suggest this possibility.

Comments

  1. Michael PeacockMay 4, 2018 at 5:25 AM

    Wouldn't the inclusion of El Bronco and Margarita Zavala point to an already compromised democratic process? Regardless of how this plays out in the general election, or in the resulting evaluation and decision, this seems to already be beyond the pale.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Richard W. CoughlinMay 9, 2018 at 7:57 AM

    Electoral democracy is endlessly manipulated.

    ReplyDelete

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