Downsizing the Presidency

On July 6, voters dealt a serious blow to the Mexican presidency. Even though it must have felt like a heart attack, the patient survived. How it will handle rehabilitation is anyone’s guess. It appears that the office that once had the power of an absolute monarch now will be reduced to the grubby work of democratic politics: compromise, persuasion and sleight of hand.

Constitutionally, the presidency was not altered by the vote, which elected opposition officeholders in massive numbers nationally; the president keeps all the powers the constitution grants him. But the power of a Mexican president has never been measured in constitutional terms. The executive branch of government has been an exercise in patriarchal tradition: a family (the Institutional Revolutionary Party), whose members (governors, union leaders, media moguls, business tycoons, etc. and their families) were dependent on the patriarch (president) and in turn supported him with respect and obedience.

All of that has changed in less than one decade.

In 1988 no opposition party had been able to place a governor in any state. Now, the federal district (Mexico City) and six states, plus hundreds of municipal presidencies across the nation are in the hands of the opposition. Shared power is weakened power. Weakened power invites disrespect. Some old-line PRI governors, like Puebla’s Manuel Bartlett and Tabasco’s Roberto Madrazo, have shown that they can challenge the president and get away with it. This lesson will not be lost on Congress, where the newly elected Chamber of Deputies is no longer controlled by the president’s party.

Contrary to some who fear the worst, this weakening of presidential power will not be a mortal blow to the nation. Mexico has survived all manner of presidential make-overs.

In the beginning there was chaos. That’s how the political history of independent Mexico should be written, because in 1824, when Mexico became a new nation, it started with the wrong social, political and cultural basis. It tried to adopt the institutional framework that had been so successful in the United States; los Estados Unidos de Mexico became a republican, democratic, federal system of government. The immediate result was disaster: internal strife and an inability to fulfill the requirements of a successful nation-building process. Political power rested in the hands of the army and local bosses. The presidency itself was an extremely weak institution commanding no political power and little respect. Between 1829 and 1857, the presidency changed hands 34 times.

The picture began to change by the end of the civil war in 1867 (after France tried to seat a European monarch in Mexico) when the Liberal Party forged two strong presidents, Benito Juarez and Porfirio Diaz. In 1911, Diaz was exiled after 35 years in the presidency, and the leaders of the revolution chose a new type of decentralization to govern the country. By the end of the 1930s, Mexico had a strong presidency within a corporatist structure, supported by peasants, workers, the military and the bureaucracy, that evolved, with some modifications, into a state party, the current Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Thus the Mexican presidency went from almost complete insignificance in the first half of the 19th century to absolute prominence a century later. Exerting total control over a party that did not tolerate real opposition, the president managed at will the nominations for governors, senators, representatives and above all, that of his own successor. The federal executive’s control of Congress and state governments made impossible the existence of a truly independent judiciary. The only real limitation on presidential power was the principle barring reelection, scrupulously observed since 1928.

Since 1935, when President Lazaro Cardenas sent into exile Gen. Plutarco Elias Calles, the last caudillo of the revolution, the presidency has been the heart of the Mexican political system.

The absence of any real challenge at the ballot box became the essence of a Mexican authoritarianism, but Washington found the arrangement suitable and called Mexico a democracy. After all, it produced what the U.S. valued most in Latin America during the Cold War: anti-communism and stability, without resorting to personal or military dictatorship.

Mexican authoritarianism began a slow but irreversible process of decay in the 1960s. The massacre of student protesters during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City was the symbolic beginning of the end. A series of economic and political crises plus social and cultural transformations eroded the traditional source of presidential legitimacy. The introduction of free market economics in the 1980s and Mexico’s opening to globalization weakened the capacity of the president to use the economy and the big state enterprises to reward (and control) workers, peasants, bankers, industrialists, middle classes--just about everyone.

In this environment, political opposition became meaningful. The old and not very significant National Action Party (PAN), a center-right and democratic organization, began to challenge the PRI at elections in the northern regions of the country. In central and southern Mexico, the challenger was a center-left coalition, an amalgam of members of the historical left plus former members of the PRI who had been marginalized by the young technocrats in charge of the economic revolution.

The reaction of the traditional political system was to resort to fraud against the left and make a marriage of convenience with the right, hoping to gain time while market economics worked its magic. Harvard graduate Carlos Salinas, who became president in 1988, chose a formula of perestroika--market economics plus a free trade agreement with the United States--without glasnost (political reformation).

Democratic transformations were becoming the norm all over the world since the fall of the Soviet Union. The weakness of the Mexican system, along with widespread corruption, a terrible economic crisis and the advent of serious electoral reform--and, perhaps the audacity of the Indian rebellion--culminated this past July 6 in a political heart attack for the state party.

As the shock wears off, it is possible that a healthy executive power will emerge in Mexico. All political actors will be better off if President Ernesto Zedillo decides to give up his role as the head of the old PRI and adopts a new one: the head of democracy in the making. It will not be easy, but it is possible. Besides, to follow any other course would be an invitation to disaster. Mexico has to be a democracy or it will not be a viable national community.

* To read previous articles in the Soundings on Mexico series, visit The Times’ Internet Web site: https://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/COMMENT