The incorporation of the INE to the opposition block PRI-PAN-Partido de Los Chuchos-Coparmex-Claudio X. González represented the definition of the electoral body as a militant political group in favor of a certain ideological current. Since its founding, the electoral body was handed over by Salinas and Zedillo to an intellectual group that came from the socialist and even communist left, but that was already part of the neoconservative realignment.
The logical thing to do in founding the electoral apparatus would have been the consolidation of a group of jurists, while the institutional task in the elections had to do with the application of the increasingly complex law. President Salinas de Gortari was the one who incorporated José Woldenberg as citizen advisor of the IFE in 1991, coming from the intellectual group of the magazine Nexos –of which he was director after finishing his cycle at the Institute– and since then the operation and the appointment of the directors is due to that intellectual cacicazgo.
The political debate after the 1988 elections was concentrated in the intellectual space, to the extent that Woldenberg strengthened the Institute for the Study of Democratic Transition as a space for appropriation of the official political interpretation after the electoral conflict of 1988.
In his current book “The Gospel of the transition” (Debate, 2009), the political scientist César Cansino opened a long discussion 1995-2005 with Woldenberg to analyze the dispute over ownership of the transition of Mexico to democracy between the intellectuals of Nexos that they had “approached the Government of Salinas so in need of support and legitimizing support and obtained in exchange a privileged place in the cultural world of the country.”
The intellectual appropriation of the transition process was consolidated by Woldenberg in a documentary made with interviews with members of his own group and since then these intellectuals decided at the time to “ideologically support the old regime and contributed more to its permanence than to its transformation, which propped up until his death despite the fact that he was already showing chronic signs for a long time.”
The debate on the transition to democracy has to do with real social and political processes, not with intellectual definitions. The intellectual bloc of Nexos appropriated the IFE-INE not only with consultancies but also with the expropriation of the discourse of transitionist ideas only in the procedural aspect of respect for the vote, but through mechanisms of increasingly increasing exercise of intellectual political authoritarianism from the Institute to limit the dynamics of political development through parties and society.
The authoritarian centralization of intellectual control in the IFE-INE and the body’s role of political authoritarianism over the political development of parties and society centralized democracy only in respect for the vote, but inhibited the political dynamics that should have led the State, its institutions and society to what Leonardo Morlino established as the quality of democracy and defined in five dimensions: rule of law, accountability, social reciprocity, regarding rights and freedoms in political, social and economic equality.
The intellectual bloc that appropriated the INE determined the definition of democracy based solely on control of the electoral roll and free elections, but in such a way that it tied its hands to the role that political parties should play in revitalizing the development of institutions beyond campaigns and elections.
The IFE-INE from Woldenberg to Lorenzo Córdova Vianello prohibited the truly democratic development of the political change promoted with the new electoral structure of 1990 and turned the parties into mere vote collectors, with which the electoral body became an element of perversion of the democratic transition and prevented the electoral liberalization from leading to a democratic establishment and consolidation of new rules and institutions, ignoring that any transition, also established by mill, is a temporary regime.
This process of perversion of the transition developed by the IFE-INE explains the current role of the Institute with Córdova Vianello and Ciro Murayama Rendón as an institution in opposition to the López Obrador group and allied to the conservative block of Va Por México.
Policy for dummies: Politics is a redistribution of power.
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