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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2007 
Mexican Leader's Job Approval Rating Soars
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
| | Mexican President Felipe Calderon keeps expectations low while he navigates a difficult political landscape. Some polls report that two-thirds of respondents say he's doing a good job. |
Felipe Calderon has kept expectations low while he has fought crime and tried to get reforms through Mexico's Congress.
Nearly five months into his presidency, Felipe Calderon's campaign against organized crime has proved largely ineffective and his vows for sweeping reforms remain unrealized. Yet the Mexican leader has seen his popularity soar.
Since taking office after polling 36 percent of the vote and winning a court fight that upheld his razor-thin margin over a leftist rival, Calderon's approval ratings have climbed steadily, and now some polls report that two-thirds of respondents say he's doing a good job, or at least good enough.
"It's really hard to get your hands on him. " said Federico Estevez, a Mexico City political analyst. "He doesn't over-reach, which is always positive."
Calderon's approach of keeping expectations low and then meeting some of them has proved effective in winning over the public while he navigates a difficult political landscape.
"At the moment, the public isn't evaluating the results but his willingness to take action," said Roy Campos, president of Consulta Mitofsky, a leading Mexican polling firm, which recently found that 65 percent of Mexicans approved of Calderon's performance. "They see someone who is making decisions."
Calderon's popularity at this point matches that of his predecessor, Vicente Fox, whose election in 2000 ended seven decades of one-party rule. But the amiable Fox faced huge public expectations and proved largely ineffective in getting his agenda through a Congress dominated by his foes.
By contrast, much of the public sees Calderon as more effective, if considerably less cuddly.
"He's not a particularly nice guy," Estevez said of the president. "Part of the hard edge in Calderon is that he demands loyalty, and that's not necessarily a bad thing."
Exception to converts
The opinion polls suggest Calderon has won over many people who didn't vote for him. But the converts don't include those who marked ballots for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City who lost to Calderon by 250,000 votes out of 42 million cast.
Lopez Obrador, who continues to insist that Calderon's election was fraudulent, wields considerable influence within his Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and smaller parties within the coalition he led in last year's election.
Lawmakers from those parties continue to oppose Calderon in Congress, ensuring the doesn't have a blank check for his policy platform.
Still, as many analysts predicted, Calderon has proved adept so far at dealing with a Congress dominated by his opponents, cobbling together coalitions that last month passed a sweeping change to the public employees health care and pension system.
Earlier in the week, all political parties agreed to begin negotiating constitutional "state reforms" that seek to end congressional gridlock and restructure Mexico's unwieldy bureaucracies.
Such an agreement proved impossible during Fox's six-year term.
The pension changes last month were approved over the opposition from Democratic Revolution and other leftist parties and despite nationwide protests.
"This was a reform that was prepared slowly but steadily," said analyst Benito Nacif, who publishes a newsletter monitoring Congress. "It was the result of an audacious yet careful political operation."
Alliance with rival party
Tellingly, the pension reforms had the support of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico as a one-party system for most of the 20th century. PRI lawmakers had blocked most of Fox's major initiatives during his six-year term.
But Calderon, who as a lifelong member of the conservative National Action Party spent decades battling the PRI, now has made alliances with the former ruling party.
In particular, analysts say, Calderon has forged a public and widely criticized partnership with Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the 2 million-member national teachers union.
Until last year, when she refused to support the PRI's presidential candidate, Gordillo was one of the part's highest-ranking officials. She still controls the loyalty of a sizable block of the PRI's congressional delegation.
And her union members are the largest group of beneficiaries of the State Workers Social Security Institute, known by its Spanish acronym ISSTE, which will oversee the measures approved last month.
Since taking office in December, Calderon appointed Gordillo's son-law as an assistant secretary of education and one of her closer allies to head the ISSTE.
The press and Calderon's political opponents screamed foul.
"It had seemed that this alliance with Elba Esther was all costs and no benefits," Nacif said. "But it now appears that the reform wouldn't have been possible without it."
Nacif and other analysts say the overhaul of the public employees' health care and pension system should open the door to revamping tax policy, which many consider essential for Mexico's economic health.
But, he said, a reform allowing private investment in what are now government-owned energy monopolies will prove a long time coming.
Signature initiative
"The majority understand that an energy reform is difficult," he said of the way in which Calderon aides had handled the energy policy. "They don't want to raise expectations."
The signature initiative of Calderon's young presidency — sending troops and federal police into cities and rural areas to crack down on Mexico's drug-smuggling gangs — has so far come up short.
Leading newspapers and magazines have accused the president of trying to militarize the country. Despite the army offensive in some of the states most affected by drug violence, more than 700 people, including scores of police, have been killed since the beginning of the year.
But with opinion polls showing organized crime by far the greatest public worry, even ineffective action gets an approving nod.
"The Mexican public prizes action," said Campos, the pollster.
dudley.althaus@chron.com |
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