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 Business News | September 2007 
Mexican Lawmakers Restrict Campaign Broadcasts
 Adam Thomson - The Financial Times
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Mexico's Senate this week approved constitutional changes to the country's electoral laws that stand significantly to reduce the airtime political parties and candidates can use during campaigns.
In a rare show of cross-party solidarity, legislators from the three largest parties voted overwhelmingly in favour of the changes in spite of fierce opposition from private broadcasters.
The proposals, which analysts say will hit profits of Mexico's private broadcasters, will now move to the lower House of Congress for approval.
They will also have to gain approval in more than half the country's 32 local legislatures before they become law.
Santiago Creel, Senate leader and member of President Felipe Calderón's centre-right National Action Party (PAN), said that the reform represented a new beginning for electoral politics. "This will make us think more about the constitution and less about the television," he said following the vote, which found 111 in favour and just 11 against.
The reform proposals are complex and several important points are yet to be resolved. But in essence they will no longer allow political parties or candidates to purchase airtime for advertisements from radio or television broadcasters.
Instead, political campaigners will have to use the three minutes per hour that television and radio companies are obliged to give over to the state. The companies will have to allocate those minutes during primetime viewing instead of their current practice of bunching them together in early-morning or late-night slots.
In addition, individuals will no longer be allowed to buy airtime to place political advertisements, as happened during last year's hard-fought and controversial presidential campaign.
According to Alejandro Hope of GEA, a consultancy in Mexico City, 280,000 political advertisements were placed last year for which the balance sheets of the various campaigns failed to account. He said that they were purchased by individuals as a way for the candidates to skirt around the legal advertising limits.
Yesterday, Mr Hope described the changes as "far-reaching . . . they will change the way political parties carry out their campaigns". He also said that they were "a blow to the big television and radio stations" such as Televisa and TV Azteca, the country's leading broadcasters.
Last year, Televisa's total sales were roughly $3.5bn, and it is thought as much as $200m of this came from political campaigns during the election.
Both Televisa and TV Azteca, as well as industry bodies, had lambasted the proposed legislation, arguing that it represented a threat to freedom of expression.
Javier Tejado, Televisa's legal representative, said it was akin to "Soviet-stylepolitics to maintain the status quo".
However, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, an influential senator for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), said that the changes would help to reduce the importance of financing during political campaigns as well as lessen the power of the media.
"What are we defending here, a country dominated by advertising and ratings or the right of citizens to obtain information that helps to inform their decisions?" |
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