Mexican democracy: Between what hasnt yet disappeared and what has yet to come

The fight for democracy isn’t over in Mexico, as we incorrectly believed in 2000. If the new spaces now opened up with the independent candidacies are to democratize the country, civil society must recover its role as a protagonist. Without the activation of civil society, the current political reform may well be no more than the beginning of an authoritarian restoration cloaked in a modernizing veil.

Alberto J. Olvera / Armando Chaguaceda /Israel Ceballos

It seems a cruel paradox that after 20 years of democratic transition in Mexico, fewer people today support that democracy than when the process started. The percentage of the population that says it is satisfied or very satisfied with the workings of the country’s democracy has fallen from over 50% in 2000 to 41% in 2006 and 23% in 2013.

These days, according to the survey by Latinobarómetro 2013, only 32% of Mexican citizens believes that conditions for electoral competition are fair and only 19% believes that income distribution in Mexico is fair. The concept of democracy appears to have been devalued in the eyes of Mexican citizens, with these figures expressing serious collective frustration with the results of the process. That disappointment is not exclusive to Mexicans, but is shared these days by the citizens of most of the world’s democracies. In Mexico’s case, however, the drop in citizen support for democracy is more pronounced, and shows an extremely risky level of desperation.

A long transition process

What are the causes of this disillusionment? In the first place, it’s worth remembering that the democratic transition in Mexico has been characterized by its extended duration, fundamentally electoral nature and inability to transform the old regime’s constitutional, institutional and cultural foundations.

To be more precise, the transition process has been an extraordinarily prolonged interregnum between the end of an era that still hasn’t left the scene and the beginning of another that hasn’t finished being built. Before 2000, the regime was based on an almost absolute presidentialism of a meta-constitutional nature, the basis of which was total control by the President of the Republic over the legislature, judiciary and state governors, made possible by the President’s complete control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), almost the only party, which held unbroken power for 71 years.

1986 - 2000: Two strands of opposition to the PRI

Once the transition started, the process passed through two distinct phases. The first phase (1986-2000) covers the cycle of struggle for electoral democracy. During it there was great civil leadership, which foreshadowed both the scope and limits of Mexican democratization.

During this phase two strands of opposition to the authoritarian regime emerged: one, the National Action Party (PAN), a liberal Right with a limited agenda for electoral democratization and construction of a rule of law, and the other, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), a nationalist-populist strand with left-leaning hints and an agenda for restoring the mythic nationalist past; it wanted to eliminate the neoliberal elements the PRI regime had included in the Constitution, which was reformed extensively during the Salinas de Gortari government (1988-1994).

With those two oppositions parties, the authoritarian regime was presented with favorable circumstances in which to play its cards, allying itself with the PAN to impose neoliberal reforms, while partially giving way to the leftwing opposition and broad-based civil mobilization with successive electoral reforms, recognizing the opposition’s victories in state and municipal elections.

This process escaped the government’s control after the 1996 electoral reform and creation of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), legally and politically autonomous from the government. The PRI lost the presidential elections in 2000.

Between 1995 and 2000 the PAN and the PRD promoted timid but interesting local constitutional reforms in the states they governed. They also showed certain capacity for democratic innovation, driving forward laws for citizen participation, transparency and access to information, trying to de-corporatize some aspects of daily politics.

2000 - 2014: Presidentialism weakens

The second phase started in December 2000, the real interregnum of the PAN governments (Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón). During this period it wasn’t possible to implement any significant reform due to the joint blockade by the Left and the PRI of both administrations’ initiatives. During this stage presidential power was weakened and political power became fragmented. At the federal level the legislative branch was strengthened by the PRI’s veto power, which emerged from the fact that the PAN didn’t have a majority in any of the chambers. In the states, governors were empowered to get rid of the presidential guardianship. Something similar happened with the de facto economic, political and criminal powers.

While all this was going on, civil society was demobilizing, in the vain hope that the alternation in office would provide a change in the political order.

The PRI’s power:
A tainted political culture

In the long term, Mexico’s transition to democracy can be seen as the simultaneous deployment of two different processes: on the one hand, the old PRI regime’s turn towards neoliberalism, in which the PAN was a strategic ally; and on the other, a purely electoral democratization in which the PAN and the PRD were allies in the authoritarian phase (1988-2000) and later opposed each other in the interregnum.

The fact that the PRI, although having lost presidential control, stayed in the center of the political spectrum allowed it to maintain opportunistic alliances with the PAN and the PRD as the occasion demanded. For practical purposes, the PRI’s strategy was to block any initiative of the PAN government to transform the Constitution, state institutions or public policies, a conservative strategy in which it had the PRD as an ally.

The PRI’s capacity in the interregnum depended not only on its electoral strength and holding on to a large majority of state and municipal governments, but also on the victory of its political culture during the transition process. This was a triumph since the PAN, the PRD and the satellite parties adopted the PRI’s traditional political practices in the competition for local, state and national elections.

The fact that the transition was purely electoral obliged all parties to emulate or copy the PRI’s practices: generalized cronyism, a barely transparent search for funding through private means and selection of candidates to elected posts based on popularity and/or financial criteria, even though they lacked political experience or had PRI political backgrounds.

The cronyism continued

Once in government, all parties developed cronyism practices that allowed them to build secure electoral bases from which to compete in the next elections. They all focused their actions on the electoral short term and adopted traditional practices to ensure their political survival. The meager local democratic innovations of the previous years were forgotten in a scenario of generalized political colonization of all the formally autonomous institutions, such as the IFE, state electoral institutions, the Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI, founded in 2003) and others like it in the states and the National and State Commissions for Human Rights.

This opportunistic attitude consolidated the existing political culture: generalized cronyism, corporatism and particularism (privileging people or groups based not on their rights but their links to power), practices that had been the basis of the relationship between the PRI authoritarian regime and society. There was sigificant cultural continuity between the old regime and the interregnum represented by the two PAN governments.

In sum, electoral democracy didn’t mean a significant change in the life of Mexicans with the exception of certain political liberalization only achieved in some states but in constant rollback, more competitive elections and some new faces in politics in certain local and state spheres. This cultural continuity was ensured because in the interregnum period the PRI stayed in power in most state and municipal governments, which allowed it to control not only those states’ executive branch but also their legislative and judicial branches. It is vital not to forget that the judiciary in the states was never reformed and for all practical purposes the local legislatures weren’t either. Furthermore, the existence of divided governments in some states didn’t indicate a professionalization and transformation of local authorities. On the contrary, in almost all cases, both the legislature and the judiciary were totally controlled by the executive, whichever party was in power. In other words, the old presidentialism turned into “governorism,” which was and still is simply a faithful copy of old political practices from the last century.

The time of the cartels

In the context of authoritarian continuity, this fragmentation of power facilitated the deployment of organized crime, previously controlled by an omnipotent central government. The drug trafficking cartels, awash with more money than ever before, found municipal and state governors hard-pressed for funds for future electoral campaigns and ready to corrupt themselves to pay debts incurred in previous campaigns. The local police forces, in themselves largely not professional and prone to corruption, were easy prey to the criminals in most of the country.

In the absence of political innovation during the long democratic transition period, it is logical that the political culture of the past was preserved. Continuity of the institutions and the authoritarian culture was also made possible by the absence of alternative projects for the Mexican State’s basic structures. No party proposed radical reform for the sick federalism, especially for its weakest and least functional link, the municipality. Nor did any party propose a truly operative government that would take seriously a civil service career for public officials. The only significant reform during this stage was the creation of autonomous organizations with limited powers, which immediately became inoperative on being politically colonized.

Little social organization

The role that civil society should play in any democratizing process is relevant, since mobilization opens the game up to new actors and demands. In Mexico’s case, the decisive weight of the grassroots struggles that accompanied the drawn-out transition process was substituted to a certain extent by the leadership role of the parties and the state or de facto powers that design and run the national political agenda.

In comparison with neighboring countries, Mexican citizens are poorly organized and take less part in political affairs and community life, with recreational and religious groups being the ones that attract the greatest number of people. In the context of a study we undertook recently, members of grassroots organizations from various regions of the country bore witness to the existence of a well-established conservative political culture in political, religious and social matters, a culture unused to participation. This is a reality in broad sectors of a citizenry used to a paternalistic State that responds to serious social problems with cronyism and particularism.

And civil society?

Within the organized social ector, we can see differences between more institutionalized organizations, well endowed with private or state funding and public recognition, and other smaller, weaker ones, which depend on their own scarce resources and work with poorly trained personnel.

The study we conducted revealed that in Mexico’s civil society organizations, the problems that particularly stand out are those arising from the concentration of decisions in few hands and the non-existence or non-functioning of any bodies of government and participation that might be effective. Furthermore, the existence of paternalistic organizations linked to governmental politics, making few demands for rights and with scant democratic management of their processes, makes advocacy and autonomous activism in this sector difficult.

With regard to laws and agencies focusing on citizen participation and collaboration with the government, those surveyed insisted that they should work to unite people and should influence public policy, bringing it down to a level where citizens might really influence and supervise how public policy is conducted at the local level.

One such agency is what are called City Councils, supposedly created for citizens to participate in implementing and co-managing services and in monitoring public policy on education, the environment, health... As usually happens in our countries, the Councils have worked more as legitimating devices for the political class and/or channels for insertion and institutional association for a sector of professionalized NGO activists than as ways to promote the participation of broad sectors of the citizenry.

“Filtered” public policies

In the study, civil society entities for participation or collaboration were assessed as a mere legitimating formality for the government’s actions. Experts and activists also highlighted that civil society organizations did not appropriate the characteristics of this type of group. Some consensus exists on the need for better coordination with the government, to make it easier for organizations to access public resources, instead of punishing them or complicating the procedures.

One source interviewed for the study stated: “Policies supporting civil society organizations have filters: resources end up in organizations allied to the party and government in power. Some that applied for resources didn’t receive a satisfactory reply, despite doing all that was established.” Locally they pointed to a deficit in community development policies, either because few resources reach the municipality due to the City Council’s limited capacity or because there’s limited acceptance of organizations’ actions that go beyond a paternalistic profile.

The PRI’s return to government

In 2012 the PRI returned to national government, thereby ratifying the survival of the old regime’s dominant actors and restoring a group that never completely lost power. With hindsight it was quite logical that in a context of regionalized collapse of the State, fragmentation of power and absolute incapacity of the previous two PAN governments, a sort of conservative spirit would appear in the citizenry, which expected that the PRI’s return would at least bring a bit of effectiveness to the exercise of power.

The new governing group introduced a two-part modernizing project. The first part is the culmination of the neoliberal project, implemented with brakes during the long interregnum period. The second part consists of reestablishing presidential power and reinforcing the federal government to counteract the fragmentation of power. This basically means recentralizing political power in a sort of reconstruction of presidentialism. This was about the only viable project in the current environment, given the absence of political forces that might push for an alternative democratic project.

The pact for Mexico

The PRI has managed to implement the constitutional reforms that culminated the neoliberal cycle through a peculiar arrangement. It’s called the Pact for Mexico, an agreement between the three main political parties (PRI, PAN, PRD) to push through a group of reforms, some of which were clearly neoliberal and others associated with the reform of public administration and extension of social assistance, tending towards partial democratization of the State and strengthening its capacities to regulate the de facto powers.

Signed on December 2, 2012, one day after Enrique Peña Nieto was inaugurated President, the Pact for Mexico is an elitist alliance between the new governing group and the fragile leadership of the two main opposition parties. In a single document with 96 objectives, it set out the central reforms in all three parties’ political programs.

The reformist process based on this pact and experienced throughout 2013 can be understood as a venture that satisfied not only the PRI grouping but also the PAN and the PRD in a mediated way. Recentralizing control of the electoral processes and public expenditure is in the interest of both opposition parties, which are desperate at seeing how they’ve been almost destroyed in the states.

The pact’s proposed strengthening of the economic regulatory agencies—the Federal Competition Commission and Federal Telecommunications Commission—is a convenient mechanism for the governing party because it strengthens the State vis-à-vis the de facto powers, something the opposition parties had demanded for a long time. In any event, accepting certain reforms that strengthen the State’s management capacity is in the interest of the new group in government and is part of its agenda for restoring centralized power.

As for another aspect of the pact, public management in the local sphere, our recent investigation confirmed he deficits of professionalism, transparency and technical and administrative capacity that hamper the development of Mexico’s municipalities. These limitations won’t be resolved mechanically with a reelection of authorities, improved revenue collection or greater resource transfer. The Mexican municipality continues, as does a large part of provincial politics, to be a pasture for local fiefdoms, improvisation and the worst practices of government and management. Encouraging mechanisms and entities for participation, accountability and creating transparent bodies open to civil society’s influence and citizens’ participation in even a loose sense are still pending issues across broad swaths of the country.

New challenges are arising

Strengthening democracy in a substantive way that goes beyond electoral and party matters would require dealing with the new challenges now appearing with innovations such as citizen candidacies, management of social programs and mechanisms for direct democracy.

In a political scene so notably colonized by parties, particularly one as powerful and centralized as the PRI, as well as by de facto powers capable of metamorphosing their agendas, turning them into “public opinion” and “general interest” issues, rescuing democracy in its dimensions as a historic process and grassroots movement presupposes a reconstruction of the values and traditional practices that are still alive within the citizenry. It requires overcoming the hegemonic practices of a dominant sector of the Left, whose sectarianism, scarcity of programs, weak leadership and lack of self-criticism and internal democracy hinder them from attracting broad social and political majorities capable of challenging the predominance of the Right in the form of the PRI and the PAN.

Independent candidacies
and grassroots consultation

The scant democratic progress of today’s phase is centered on two innovations: one, the approval of independent candidacies, prohibited up now, since only registered parties could put up candidates. This innovation still needs to be regulated at the federal level then approved and regulated in state constitutions.

The other is the very recent constitutional approval of the Grassroots Consultation Law that provides for the possibility of national plebiscites on issues of “national interest,” which in any case must be sanctioned by the legislative branch and,
in the event of a dispute, by the Supreme Court of Justice.

It’s not yet clear how these two innovations will work or when they will actually come into force. The Left wants to use the consultation law to overturn recent constitutional reforms on oil issues, which for the first time allow private investment in this sector. But it’s unlikely that the government will give in to this demand and the independent candidacies have a long legislative road ahead of them.

As to social policy, there is a new recentralization project, since state and municipal governments had a free rein to do what they wanted during the interregnum. The federal government has defined new rules that oblige resource transfers to states and municipalities to be applied to certain types of projects and there’s an effort to use certain CSOs as battering rams in this process, as intermediaries or validating agents. Should its proposal prevail, the federal government will thus achieve double success: control over local governments and political colonization of at least a sector of civil society.

There’s still a lot to be done

The struggle for democracy is not over in Mexico, as many hoped in 2000. There’s still a lot to be done to achieve full respect for the laws and electoral institutions. The spaces opened up by constitutional approval of independent candidacies should be reinforced and regulated in such a way that they aren’t captured by the de facto powers. To achieve this, civil society should take back the leadership role it once held, in a new cycle of struggle aimed at guaranteeing that the recently approved political reform serves as a platform for democratization and doesn’t become a space for massive distraction. Without the reactivation of civil society, the current reformist period could be no more than the start of an authoritarian restoration, cloaked in a modernizing veil.

Alberto Olvera is a sociologist and economist and Armando Chaguaceda is a historian and political scientist in Mexico.

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