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 Editorials | June 2005 
Mexico State Race Ending, and None Too Soon
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
| | Mexican revolutions: Supporters of competing candidates clash at the Mexico City headquarters of the PRI, the former ruling party. |
The campaign for governor of the State of Mexico culminates in a vote next week, after which it will be out of its misery. Initially billed as a kind of super-race and a key indicator of the relative electability of the prospective 2006 presidential candidates, the campaign quickly turned into an embarrassing display of shallow rhetoric, infantile posturing and orgiastic spending. And then it got worse.
If casual conversations are any indication, not too many State of Mexico voters are taking this thing too seriously. That's not great news in terms of civics, but it's a tribute to the good sense of the mexiquenses. This is a campaign, after all, whose major highlight consists of one candidate spending several weeks and considerable billboard square footage obliquely accusing the frontrunner of being good-looking.
The current polls suggest that the nation's most populous state will look much the same the day after the vote as the day before. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has been entrenched in the state capital of Toluca for decades, with all the unpleasant implications the word "entrenched" implies in Mexico. Barring eleventh-hour collapse, the PRI is positioned to retain the governorship that presidential hopeful Arturo Montiel has occupied with ceaseless self-promotion since 1999.
President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN), however may find its position as the second political force in the state weakened. It's locked in a tight right for second with the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), when it was expected to be locked in a tight race for first with the PRI. The PAN will still control several big State of Mexico cities, but it's still a viable candidate away from running the real show in Toluca.
A second-place finish for the PRD might boost its status, or so its leaders will say. It still appears to be too underfunded and regionalized to challenge statewide, but the real question — still unanswered — is whether it can harvest more votes there in the presidential election next year.
"Same as it ever was," the typical mexiquense will shrug if the PRI lead holds up on July 3. But polls and pundits won't settle for any such ho-hum interpretation. They're going to give us insights, in spades.
For one thing, we'll hear a lot about how the so-called Fox Effect has turned into a liability for any PAN hopeful. That's probably true, but PAN candidate Rubén Mendoza shouldn't be denied his own due credit for waging a campaign almost as bizarre as it was inept. First he alienated a large percentage of panistas by bullying his way to the nomination. Then he sunk to the puerile "I'm not guapo" theme, aimed at offsetting his PRI opponent's telegenic youthfulness. For a grand finale, Mendoza coyly didn't deny being involved in the liberation of a truckful of ball-shaped PRI campaign props, apparently so he could later make some unbearably lame manhood jokes.
If his party wins, we'll also hear about PRI leader and probable presidential nominee Roberto Madrazo's strengthened position by virtue of his ability to deliver a big state. We hear this every time the PRI wins a gubernatorial election, and the opposite every time they lose one.
More significantly (or more ominously, depending on your point of view), a PRI victory in the State of Mexico will underscore the fractionalized former national ruling party's ability to come together when it needs to. That has a lot more implications for 2006 than brownie points for either Madrazo or Montiel.
What we'll hear most, however, is how damaging a third-place finish by PRD candidate Yeidckol Polevnsky will be for her party. If she does finish at below 30 percent of the vote (and remember, we don't know that yet), the big loser will be seen to be not Polevnsky herself but Mexico CIty Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the front-running PRD candidate for the presidency.
López Obrador and the PRD can blame themselves for that perception. Polevnsky's campaign has been based almost entirely on her ties to the mayor. His picture is at least as big as hers in much of her advertising. The frequency of his appearances at her campaign stops has gone far beyond a party leader's duty to help out one of his own.
Polevnsky was criticized temporarily and unfairly at the outset of the race for having changed her name when younger; now her campaign signs make it look like she's changed it again — to Yeidckol Polevnsky López Obrador.
The I'm-with-him strategy has been less than a stunning success. Hitching your campaign to somebody else's star doesn't say "leadership ability" to the typical voter. And mexiquenses are naturally suspicious of such an overt outside presence in their state election. When Polevnsky promised to bring Mexico City's social policies to the State of Mexico, even many who would like to see those policies implemented locally still didn't like the way it sounded.
That said, interpreting a disappointing Polenvsky performance as inflicting serious damage on López Obrador's presidential hopes is overdoing it. For one thing, viewing the state race as a referendum on López Obrador's legitimacy was only applicable in the context of the desafuero, which became a dead issue before the state campaign began in earnest. But even conceding that the mayor put some of his prestige on the line in his active campaigning for the PRD candidate, it's absurd to judge it outside the context of the enormous spending differential between Polevnsky and her two opponents.
The PRD made an early decision to run a barebones campaign and stuck to it. The PAN and the PRI made the opposite decision. The result: As of June 20, the PRI and PAN had spent a combined 250 million pesos on media spots alone, according to unofficial estimates. The PRD: Less than 32 million. And anybody who's seen the pollution of campaign billboards and posters knows the gap there is even wider.
That huge spending advantage clearly helped the PRI. A year ago, Enrique Peña Nieto was a virtual unknown with an articulate manner and a haircut straight out of Archie comics. Some 140 million media-spent pesos later (some say it's much more than that, breaking the allowed limits), the PRI candidate is favored to win next Sunday.
Short of coming up with another 100 million pesos, there wasn't much López Obrador or anybody else could do against that kind of money. And the PRD must have known it going in. The plan seems to have been to hit 30 percent and tout that as a victory, given the spending differential.
That could happen — and even more, considering the apparent last-minute momentum. If nothing else, Polevnsky's running well ahead of the money. According to EL UNIVERSAL, in the media-spot spending breakdown, Peña Nieto is responsible for 48 percent of the total expenditure, Mendoza for 41 percent, and Polevnsky for 11 percent. So at 28 percent of the vote, the PRD's polling 17 points ahead of its share of the spending.
Whatever happens next Sunday, what this state election tells us about the 2006 presidential race has nothing to do with López Obrador's perceived strength or weakness. The take-home message is that vapid discourse threatens to rein supreme. Most of those hundreds of millions of PAN and PRI pesos were used for happy-talk spots aimed not at communicating stances on issues but at associating the candidate with positive abstractions. This, of course, is exactly how advertisers sell merchandise.
So the in-vogue political philosophy of tying democracy to the market is reflected in how we pick leaders today. In the State of Mexico, there will be no voters next Sunday choosing a candidate based on ideas. There will be consumers buying a product based on a marketing campaign.
Take a look at the early TV ads for the presidential pre-candidates and you see the same kind of lighter-than-air manipulation. Is that what we're in for? We can only hope that the sheer magnitude of the 2006 vote will force a more worthwhile discussion.
kellyg@prodigy.net.mx |
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