In a late political time because the Elections for the President of the Republic will be in June 2024 –within 15 months–, Mexico re-entered an intense political debate that has as its referent the dispute for electoral democracy that today is presented between two dominant groups: the center-right political bureaucracy that has never considered the reform of the PRI regime and a conjunctural current of populism –it is not enough to be from the left– that seeks the revalidation of the State as the political, economic and social axis.
Yes ok Mexico could never have been typified as a dictatorship nor as an authoritarian-repressive regimethe political control of PRI from 1929 to 2000 and then its validity as a structure of the political-administrative apparatus They defined the apparatus of power. The so-called crisis of 1968 –the youth rebellion that took to the streets to protest until they ran into an authoritarian response on October 2– led not to a transition to democracy, but to an endless succession of isolated reforms that moved in a single political space: authoritarian détente.
In Mexico, the Spanish transition to democracy had a very good political reception, but strictly speaking there was never any thought of following in its footsteps because Mexico was not a dictatorship like Franco’s, although it did have expressions of severe repression, but followed by openings of political and social détente.
Of the political reform of 1977 that then redefined the party system with the legalization of the Marxist-Leninist Mexican Communist Party and of course anti-systemic to the electoral reform initiative of President López Obrador in 2022, The political transit of Mexico has had three characteristics: the structure of a statist Constitution that guarantees social rights, the existence of a productive system that could never assume its class relationship and that exhausted itself in mass manipulation, and the practical impossibility of dismantling the authoritarian State that inherited the Mexican Revolution and that has placed itself above parties, productive classes and society.
The PRI was never a formal political party, but it operated as the mass control political apparatus of the state bureaucratic elite Through its operation, in turn, as the political control apparatus of the regime, dominating all the productive classes and all ideological formations. The PRI came to have the militancy –not proven, but functionalist– of 10 million workers and at key moments they were important to demobilize business and social harassment.
The PRI lost the presidential elections in 2000, after 71 years of partisan dominance, but it found itself with an opposition incapable of building an alternative: the center-right PAN governed from 2000 to 2012 in alliance with the PRI and therefore without the capacity to rebuild the regime; In 2012, the PRI returned to the presidency with the media figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, but with the task of strengthening the market-economic neoliberal project that had the full support of the center-right.
In 2018, the opposition candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador raised the banner of regime change and the search for a fourth systemic transformation –after Independence, the liberal Reform and the Mexican Revolution–, although only defined as a discursive post-neoliberal proposal; In his four years in government, López Obrador has only attempted to rebuild the old social populist model of 1917-1982, but with the strategic error of diverting resources, spirits, and discourses into government projects that have not modified productive or power relations. .
The authoritarian crisis that passed from the 1968 student conflict to the 1988 electoral fraud was faced with partial decisions only for political-electoral détente that failed to configure a systemic reconstruction. Mexico has gone from the PRI to the PAN, from the PAN to the PRI and from the PRI to Morenabut without rebuilding its productive system and dragging imbalances in the economic dynamics that have necessarily caused political and government crises.
The Mexico’s current political battle revolves around the reorganization of the National Electoral Institute, an office that was created to take the organization of the elections out of the Government, but which resulted in a political type instance that defines the characteristics of a procedural democracy based on monitoring the functioning of the parties. López Obrador’s presidential initiative seeks that the INE only organize elections and leave the definition and dispute for democracy to the political and ideological competition of parties and social organizations in parliament and in the dispute for power.
The current INE and President López Obrador’s proposal do not greatly affect the functioning of Mexican democracy because its existence in partisan alternation is already proven. The problem of Mexican democracy comes from a productive system with classes controlled by the government and therefore without the possibility of influencing the dynamics of social and political relations.
The political inconvenience of Mexico is perceived in a struggle for control of procedural democracy through an intermediary bureaucracy and political parties that lack mobility due to the mechanism of authoritarian controls by the INE. In this context, Mexico’s agenda is not democracy, but the construction of an effective Republic of laws and institutions, of an authoritarian State controlled by a conjuncture bureaucracy –whichever party wins the presidency– and with work that inhibits the dynamics of political activity.
The scenario of Mexico reveals the need for a transition to a true Republic of laws and institutions that has to go through the denationalization of the State, that is, the urgency of having a dynamic productive system in its determining classes, and through a constitutional transition from suffocating statism to a Republic with social dynamism.
The content of this column is the sole responsibility of the columnist and not of the newspaper that publishes it.
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