Mexican President Lowers His Sights

Vicente Fox is not on the ballot in today’s nationwide elections. But the hero of Mexico’s breakthrough to multiparty rule is campaigning, midway through a disappointing term, to redefine his presidency.

It has been three years since the big-talking rancher and former Coca-Cola executive broke the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s seven-decade monopoly on the office, raising high hopes for change in a nation held back by poverty and crime. But he has failed to deliver on sweeping pledges to modernize the economy, create 1 million new jobs a year and overhaul a corrupt government.

Now Mexicans are hearing a more modest, less strident Fox. In recent speeches across Mexico, he has focused on lesser achievements and avoided new promises, hoping to deflate expectations. No longer does he portray himself as the swaggering terminator of the old order or bash the former ruling party, the PRI.

Today’s election of 500 national legislators, six governors and 365 mayors is the first national referendum on Fox’s performance. By shrinking the yardstick by which he wants to be measured, the 6-foot, 6-inch president is not only trying to help his conservative National Action Party, he is also preparing for its failure to capture the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico’s lower house of Congress.

No party holds a majority in either house -- the Senate is not up for election today -- and voter surveys indicate it will stay that way in the lower chamber. That would enable the PRI to keep rallying leftist opposition to block Fox’s initiatives and doom the president, who is barred by law from reelection, to early oblivion as a lame duck.

But officials at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, say Fox views the legislative turnover as a new opportunity to find common ground with his foes on a scaled-down reform agenda before leaving office in 2006.

As a peace gesture to the PRI, Fox canceled campaign trips to electoral swing states. He skipped his party’s closing campaign rally Wednesday and delivered a conciliatory message to the nation, saying no democracy can advance “if it is moved only by a logic of confrontation.”

“He realizes the Congress is not going to change and the only way that he is going to get things to happen -- and he desperately wants things to happen -- is precisely by working together with those he kicked out of Los Pinos,” said John McCarthy, head of the government’s tourist promotion agency.

Fox, who turned 61 last week, remains popular, but many who like him personally think less of his ability to govern. The gap is measurable: His approval ratings exceed 60%, yet his party, in a tight race with the PRI, could get less than 40% of today’s vote.

“He seems sincere, open, very religious, close to his family and his mama,” said Gladys Aguirre, 52, a middle-class Mexico City housewife. “But what struck me about him as a candidate, his ‘I-can-do-it’ approach, is not consistent with the work we have seen. Not much has been fixed.”

Fox has, in fact, brought change. Millions more Mexicans have access to bank loans. Government transactions are open to public scrutiny, and a special prosecutor is reviewing newly declassified files on the disappearances of anti-government activists in the 1970s and ‘80s. Working closely with U.S. law enforcement agencies, the Fox administration has put several drug kingpins behind bars.

But hostile coalitions in Congress have thwarted every major piece of his economic agenda -- initiatives to rewrite inflexible labor laws that hinder investment, to allow private generation of electricity to stave off power shortages, and to reform the tax code to boost revenue for fighting poverty.

Fox’s reform drive faltered from the start and bogged down in partisan feuding.

He tried the bully pulpit, appealing to public opinion to bring his foes into line, but that did not work. Overruling some advisors, he refrained from all-out prosecution of PRI-era corruption, hoping that would make the party’s lawmakers amenable to negotiation, but he made little headway.

Critics say his lack of a coordinated bargaining strategy and a single chief aide to deal with Congress did not help.

When he mounted a limited legal assault on the PRI, for hitting up the state oil monopoly for campaign funds in 2000, the party countered with allegations that Amigos de Fox, a campaign committee, illegally tapped wealthy Americans to help get Fox elected.

“Fox was a folkloric candidate who mocked his adversaries, but as president he could neither destroy them nor make deals with them,” said historian Lorenzo Meyer. “At the start of a historic era in Mexico, with so much promise and so many challenges, he found himself paralyzed, not knowing what to do.”

Fox, his aides point out, had to adjust his ambitions to the same democratic forces that destroyed the PRI’s monolithic power.

“The country has changed and so have we in the administration, beginning with the president,” said Rodolfo Elizondo, a senior advisor and Fox’s communications director. “It has been an educational process, a learning curve for everyone that includes some errors. It has been a bit painful.”

Events north of the border also have worked against Fox. His top foreign policy goal, legal rights for millions of Mexican migrants in the United States, fell off Washington’s agenda after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and his friendship with President Bush soured after Mexico refused to support the war in Iraq. A recession in the United States, which buys 90% of Mexico’s exports, has flattened the economy here.

But some of Fox’s staunchest allies have begun to complain, joining adversaries on the left, that the president is not doing what he can to create the jobs he promised. Business leaders have called for more public spending to stimulate growth.

An invigorated Fox has responded in recent weeks by recasting his mission as defender of Mexico’s stability in hard times.

Touring the country and speaking to small audiences, he has rejected what he calls the “siren song” of his critics, arguing that excessive public spending could lead to ruinous inflation and a financial meltdown like the one that shook Mexico in the mid-1990s.

“In the end, it is the poor who pay the price of such populist policies,” he told the citizens of Loreto in Southern Baja California state. “In difficult times, what has to be done is protect what we have, protect the patrimony of all Mexicans, our investments and productive capacity, the income of the workers.”

A government official on that trip said he had not seen Fox so animated in months, since back surgery in March and an unflattering biography of the first lady sent the president into a funk. “He sounds very much like the Fox we all voted for -- the Fox we thought we had lost,” the official said.

A striking theme of Fox’s recent speeches is his assertion, based on censuses two years apart, that low inflation and targeted welfare spending on his watch have helped nearly 4 million Mexicans rise above the lowest rung of poverty -- the ranks of those who cannot afford a basic diet costing $1 per day.

Some economists question the claim, and Fox admits that the reported advance is “tiny” compared with what is needed to help the half of Mexico’s 100 million people who are poor and to halt migration to the United States. Critics say the president’s shift of focus is disappointing.

“Those who voted for Fox did not do so to maintain stability,” political scientist Jorge Chabat wrote in the newspaper Reforma. “They did so to bring about changes, to clarify the crimes of the past and to send the corrupt to prison.... This type of action has not been taken because the government does not want to antagonize the most hard-core sector of the PRI.”

Fox’s aides say the election should improve the prospects for change by weakening the PRI’s hard-line faction, which rejects his free-market agenda on ideological grounds.

Roberto Madrazo, the PRI’s relatively moderate leader, chose most of the party’s congressional candidates. While often depicting Fox as a ship captain with a broken compass and no idea of his course, Madrazo favors opening the energy sector to private capital, Fox’s immediate priority.

Anticipating a new climate, a few leaders of the PRI and Fox’s party have been meeting informally to discuss possible deals.

“We have to contribute to moving things forward,” said Elba Esther Gordillo, who might head the PRI bloc in the new lower house. “If we aspire to return to government in 2006, we do not want a country that is broke.”

Jorge Castaneda, who served as Fox’s foreign minister until January, has warned the president not to count on a more cooperative Congress. The PRI remains “tremendously divided” on economic reform, he said, and that could make it “impossible to get anything done.”

To break the deadlock, Fox’s team is said to be preparing an initiative to change Mexico’s political system.

One proposal would permit voter referendums, giving presidents a way around obstructive lawmakers; another would allow lawmakers to be reelected, making them more accountable to voters.

Castaneda has urged Fox to make the initiative his first priority. The top opposition leaders would be more willing to support such changes, he said, because each wants to become president without feeling as paralyzed as Fox does now.

“With this kind of reform, Fox could get a second wind,” Castaneda said, adding that he was unsure how hard the president would push for it. “Even if he passes nothing else, it is a huge achievement. That would open the road for the next president to bring about the major changes the country needs.”