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 Editorials | Opinions | August 2006 
Mexico Needs a President Committed to Democracy
 Patrick Corcoran - MexData.info
One quirk of Mexico’s nasty, pull-no-punches, still-not-quite-concluded presidential race was that the primary combatants complimented each other so beautifully. The irony was striking: Felipe Calderón’s economic expertise and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) social commitment. Calderón’s vaunted Harvard education versus AMLO’s history in the Mexican countryside. The Panista’s charmless efficiency against the Perredista’s rousing charisma.
The truth is, whatever their flaws, if you could combine the best of each man Mexico would have had the perfect candidate. However, the one fundamental attribute of any candidate in a democratic system is not charm or financial know-how, but commitment to democracy.
In this regard, AMLO has exposed himself as a fraud.
With each passing day, he cements his legacy ever more firmly as a man all too willing to subvert democracy in favor of personal ambition. AMLO calls himself a democrat; as he dramatically put it at a recent rally, “the objective of this project is to save democracy.” But his actions reveal this rhetoric as a farce.
His takeover of Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, explained as a defense of democracy, hardly expresses the will of the majority. Rather, it is a naked attempt at intimidation, complicating the lives of thousands upon thousands of Mexicans whose livelihoods are based on the restaurants, hotels, and taxis that dot the avenue.
The validity of his charges of fraud notwithstanding, the standard bearer of the Party of the Democratic Revolution has never allowed Mexico’s highly respected election tribunal (TRIFE) to prove its worth. Before the TRIFE even had a chance to fully function, AMLO’s followers were in the streets, he denounced members of the tribunal as criminal, and one of Mexico City’s primary arteries was deprived of its fundamental purpose: conveying traffic. It is hard to see how any of this behavior will oil Mexico’s democratic machinery.
There are of course times when democracy doesn’t function as designed on paper, justifying extralegal methods. The 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine comes to mind, as well as the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. However, those instances included proof of criminality and democratic dysfunction, a prerequisite for legitimate civil resistance. In both cases, there was no question that millions of citizens were systematically disenfranchised.
In Mexico this prerequisite is absent. AMLO has been able to show only isolated incidents of electoral wrongdoing, inevitable in a nation of 110 million people, but not the proof of widespread fraud that he promised. International observers, in contrast to their reaction to Ukraine’s 2004 elections, have affirmed Mexico’s contest as free and fair. AMLO is asking Mexicans to cope with his stranglehold on the capital and the presidential succession based only on allegations, not proof.
Regardless of the rhetoric, AMLO’s treatment of democracy indicates a mindset much like an average person’s feelings about gravity: it simply exists. It is something that at times must be overcome, at times must be harnessed, but no personal commitment is required to gravity because it simply is. But as is not the case with physical certainties, such an attitude toward democracy is incompatible with its exercise.
His attacks on the TRIFE, a body with an unparalleled reputation for fairness and independence, were not intended to strengthen democracy per se. Indeed, they achieved just the opposite. Nor were such attacks aimed against democracy, but rather whatever stands in the way of his rise to the presidency. Whether he is attacking its Mexican manifestations or claiming to march under its banner, democracy is essentially just peripheral for AMLO.
The only cause López Obrador truly seems to believe in is he himself. Operating with this worldview, he grants more legitimacy to his hard-core followers than the many thousands whose lives are affected by the blockades. AMLO’s mythical The People matter far more than actual Mexican voters, 70 percent of whom either voted for an opponent or did not vote at all. AMLO’s narrow self-interest is elevated above the long-term strength of Mexico’s democracy.
The true damage to Mexico’s democracy wrought by the electoral hurricane is impossible to know. If AMLO, tainted as an extremist, fades into political oblivion, future politicians are unlikely to follow his footsteps. But if the nation’s emerging leaders have learned the lesson that democracy is a flexible concept, Mexico may find itself with a brand new crisis (and the Paseo de la Reforma with a fresh batch of temporary residents) every six years.
However Mexico’s democracy responds, any person with an uncertain commitment to democracy has no business running one.
Patrick Corcoran, a MexiData.info guest columnist, is a writer who resides in Mexico City. He can be reached at corcoran25@hotmail.com. |
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