Patrick Corcoran is a freelance writer in Torreon, northern Mexico. He blogs at Gancho, which provides news and commentary on Mexican politics and security, among other subjects.
A woman casts her ballot during the mid-term elections in Mexico. Phot courtesy Patrick Corcaron
August, 2009
July 5th marked a milestone in Mexican politics. The nation replaced the entire lower house of Congress, governors in six states, and scores of other positions at the state and local levels. The indisputable winner was the Institutional Party of the Revolution (PRI), which, by earning 37 percent of the votes, vaulted from third-tier status in the Chamber of Deputies to a near-majority of the 500 representatives. (Mexico uses a combined direct and proportional system that can skew the relationship between voter support and subsequent representation.) Additionally, the PRI took five of the six governorships and a handful of important local races.
The ruling National Action Party (PAN), a conservative party that had enjoyed a plurality in the Chamber, earned only 28 percent of the vote and slipped to a distant second, with an estimated 145 seats. The leftist Democratic Party of the Revolution (PRD), which had been the second largest force in the lower house, plummeted to a woeful third place, earning some 70 seats with barely 12 percent of the vote.
ODD EPISODES MARK CAMPAIGN
Beyond the redrawn political map, several bizarre events from the electoral season will be hard to forget. The first clue that this would be an unusual campaign was the swine flu, which exploded around Mexico City days before the campaign officially kicked off in early May. Despite some speculation that the government’s reaction was both tardy and disproportionate, a majority of Mexicans joined the international community in hailing the response from President Felipe Calderon of the PAN and Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard of the PRD. One might have expected an electoral boost for each man’s party, but neither the flu-induced goodwill nor the largely invisible response from Enrique Peña (the priísta governor of Mexico State) was enough to make a dent in PRI support.
The oddities continued into the final days of May, when some 30 state and local officials, including ten mayors, from the Pacific state of Michoacán were arrested for links to a local drug gang. Such a wide-ranging accusation of official collusion was an unprecedented event. Although the mayors came from all three of the major parties, the fact that only a minority were panistas and the state is governed by the PRD led to speculation that the electoral calendar rather than the officials’ wrongdoing motivated the arrests.
The PRD suffered through another embarrassing episode in Mexico City, which became the central front in the ongoing power struggle between Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, the nation’s most prominent leftist and a longtime member of the party, and the more moderate PRD leadership. The uneasy coexistence of these two competing forces boiled over in Iztapalapa, the populous Mexico City borough and traditional PRD power base. Just a few weeks before the election, Mexico’s electoral tribunal disqualified Clara Brugada, Lopez Obrador’s preferred candidate for borough chief, because of irregularities in the PRD primary. She was replaced on the PRD ticket by the primary runner-up Silvia Oliva, a candidate less friendly to Lopez Obrador.
In the words of commentator Leo Zuckermann, the aftermath of this decision “sounds surreal because essentially it is.” Lopez Obrador directed Brugada supporters to vote for the Workers Party candidate, Rafael Acosta, instead of Oliva. (The Worker’s Party is a fringe group that has grown cozy with Lopez Obrador.) After winning, Acosta was to resign his post, and Ebrard’s Mexico City government, under instructions from Lopez Obrador, would ratify Brugada as Acosta’s replacement. Both Acosta and Ebrard lamely capitulated. Acosta won the election and remains, as of this writing, committed to the plan, making Lopez Obrador’s end-run around the electoral tribunal a success.
Lastly, and perhaps most memorably, a profound lack of satisfaction with Mexico’s politicians manifested itself in a pair of novel grass-roots movements. The first was the null-vote drive, which posited that the best way to send a message to a deaf political class whose corruption and incompetence transcend party lines was to cast a ballot with no candidate selected. The theory was that a significant portion of blank votes would force political leaders to address a vaguely defined set of popular frustrations with government in Mexico. Ultimately, null votes amounted to around 5 percent of the total.
As an alternative to the null vote, Alejandro Martí, a wealthy businessman whose son was murdered last summer and has turned into a leading anti-crime voice, encouraged his countrymen to try a different tactic. Martí’s movement, called “My Vote for Your Commitment”, held that rather than dismissing the political class through blank ballots, Mexicans should tie politicians down through a pledge (written by Martí’s group) to increase official accountability and take actions to address insecurity. Ultimately, close to 400 candidates for different offices signed Martí’s pledge. Furthermore, Martí’s movement established a mechanism for connecting candidates to their constituents that could turn into a permanent feature of the electoral landscape.
INDIVIDUAL WINNERS
The campaign could also be remembered for launching one ambitious politician on the path to the presidency, which will turn over in 2012. One potential candidate who emerged with a very strong position is Beatriz Paredes. As the president of the PRI, Paredes helped coordinate a campaign that proved spectacularly successful, and her smiling face was all over the news in the days following the contests. As a newly elected deputy expected to lead her party’s caucus, she will have an enviably high-profile stage from which to influence Mexico’s agenda over the next three years.
While the results on July 5th were dispiriting for PAN supporters, Josefina Vázquez, likely the new leader of her party’s caucus, was one of the PAN’s few winners. Like Paredes, she’ll have the chance to take advantage of a highly visible position in the Chamber of Deputies. Now that she has left her post as the Secretary of Education, Vázquez also has the added benefit of escaping what could be a very unproductive second term for Calderon. Furthermore, one of her potential rivals—national PAN chief Germán Martínez—was bounced from his post the day after the elections, his presidential possibilities essentially ruined.
Another candidate whose star dimmed was Marcelo Ebrard. The Iztapalapa dust-up showed that the Mexican left is deeply divided, and Ebrad’s submissive reaction to Lopez Obrador raises questions about whether the former can stomach the kidney-punching required of presidential aspirants. Moreover, Lopez Obrador seems dead set on running for the presidency in 2012, regardless of the PRD. Under the Workers Party banner, he might take ten percent of the nation’s leftist votes. With the left-of-center base divided, it seems highly unlikely that there would be sufficient votes to propel either one into the presidency. One solution would be for Ebrard to break with Lopez Obrador and tack to the center, where he can recover many (if not all) of the votes lost to Lopez Obrador. However, Ebrard has shown no inclination to do so thus far.
