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 Editorials | August 2007 
Mexico's Democracy Tries to Get Its Bearings
 Caller-Times
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| | Recent state elections shows nation has survived last year's presidential crisis. |
The latest elections in Baja California seem to indicate that Mexico's democracy is still trying to find its legs. In what was judged a close call for President Felipe Calderon's PAN party, the governor's election went to its candidate, Juan Guadalupe Osuna, who barely staved off a challenge from a free-wheeling billionaire gambling magnate.
The election, following the tumultuous 2006 presidential election, was another indication of the shake out of three-way politics in Mexico.
Mexico's democracy underwent a trial by political firestorm in 2006. Mexicans were witnesses to a presidential election like nothing before in their nation's history.
Calderon and populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, waged a no-holds barred contest. Lopez Obrador's candidacy seemed to promise a turn to left for another government in Latin America, following the model of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. In a Mexican version of Bush-Gore in 2000, Calderon was finally declared the winner by a whisker-thin margin votes weeks after Election Day. Lopez Obrador showed himself to be a sore loser, crying foul over the election results. Convinced that certain victory had eluded him only by virtue of electoral fraud, Lopez Obrador vowed to become the nation's shadow president and promised political mischief. All of which made this year's Mexican political calendar an intriguing one.
If there was a flirtation with a Chavez-type socialism, that may have cooled. Lopez Obrador's PRD, was established as a major player by the 2000 race. But Lopez Obrador is mostly operating outside that party and is rapidly becoming old news. The headliner for the party now is Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon. In a highly popular move with the city's moderate and poor residents, he built two city beaches. He is interested in fighting pollution and has ordered city officials to ride bicycles to work once a month.
The conservative PAN party has seen something of a rollback, but a defeat in the Baja state to Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon would have been disastrous. The party views its victory in Baja in 1989 as historic. That victory was the first step to loosening the grip of the PRI party that had ruled Mexico for 70 years and which culminated in the victory of Vicente Fox in 2000.
PRI on the comeback
The results of gubernatorial elections in the Yucatan earlier in the year and in legislative and municipal elections in the states of Aguascalientes and Oaxaca show how much ground the PRI has made up since 2000. PRI candidates won the governorship in the Yucatan and the legislatures in Aguascalientes and Oaxaca. The old-line party is trying to recreate itself, or at least trying to present a different face to the voters from its old corrupt image. But the former ruling party is in something of an identity crisis, caught between its old guard and reformists.
The PAN and the PRI are both moderates. That two of the three major parties in Mexico are operating mostly in the maintstream while the shining star of the country's leftist party is focused on urban transporation indicates a country finding its way toward a vibrant democracy after nearly a century in the political wilderness.
Elsewhere in Latin America, Chavez may finding fertile ground, but not in Mexico, which is good for Mexicans and good for the United States. |
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