It’s All Over, Mr. Fox

Mexico’s midterm elections confirm what many had suspected: Vicente Fox’s presidency is over.

Trapped once again by a divided Congress in which his party failed to obtain a majority, Fox’s reform agenda doesn’t stand a chance. He will continue to live at the official residence at Los Pinos but he won’t be able to enact any changes from there. He will kiss babies and inaugurate events, but none of this will amount to anything. He will talk about pending legislative initiatives but they won’t be approved.

The remaining three years of Fox’s term will amount to little more than a Potemkin presidency, in which a popular president serves as a front for a paralyzed government.

It’s too late to assign blame, and anyway, most Mexicans understand where it lies. The president knows how to be a good cheerleader but doesn’t know how to make decisions; he knows how to sell ideas but doesn’t know how to put them into practice; he knows how to charm the media but doesn’t know how to horse-trade with Congress.

The people are aware of these failings and forgive them because he’s perceived as a good, well-intentioned man. But in the minds of many Mexican voters, Fox is one thing and his party is another. This week’s electoral results proved that people can love Fox and hate the National Action Party, or PAN; support the person and distance themselves from a party that has not helped him enough.

In this election, Fox supporters stayed home, and the low turnout benefited the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which mobilized its traditional base. This paradox will continue throughout the remainder of his term. Fox will soar in the polls as the PAN crashes everywhere.

The PAN today is a party with its head in its hands. Its inability to deliver on promises of economic prosperity, reduced crime and more responsive government paved the way for a PRI comeback. The former ruling party gained more than 20 seats, while the PAN lost more than 40.

The PAN’s constant bickering with Fox over indigenous rights and fiscal reform made it possible for the electorate to punish the party while sparing the president. Without the benefit of the multiplier effect that Fox had on the party three years ago, the PAN is shrinking back to its normal size.

This is bad news for its potential presidential contender and Interior Minister Santiago Creel, whom the PAN is grooming for office because Fox cannot, by law, run for reelection. In the course of his duties, Creel ignored the PRI’s record of corruption for the sake of congressional votes that never materialized anyway. Instead of condemning the PRI for past misdeeds, he insisted on collaborating with it. The results of that mistaken policy are there for all to see: a strengthened PRI and a weakened PAN, a cornered president and three years of more of the same.

Paralysis will prevail and the PRI is poised to take full advantage of it, not because of what the party offers but because of the vacuum it fills. As change fails to assume a concrete shape, the past seeps through. The PRI, which held power for 71 years, is coming back because there’s nothing to stop it. And while it does, the PAN is too busy wringing its hands, the president is too busy boosting his own popularity, the Mexican left is too busy worrying how it can gain more than 20% of the vote.

The PRI advances by default -- it does so in a rudderless fashion, it does so with discredited leaders, it does so despite deep internal divisions and it does so because it can. The PRI’s electoral renaissance does not bode well for the future, given the party’s track record of corruption, patronage politics and economic mismanagement.

Now Mexico will have to live with the consequences, including the empowerment of the PRI’s current leader, Roberto Madrazo. A dinosaur burdened with numerous accusations of electoral fraud, Madrazo represents the old system of lying, cheating and stealing at its worst. He will use his victory to unite disparate factions in favor of a common cause: tripping up Fox and sabotaging the PAN.

The PRI has no incentive whatsoever to collaborate in Congress, because -- as this election proves -- the party wasn’t blamed for the stalemate there. The PRI will continue to be intransigent about pending economic reforms because it has nothing to lose and a lot to gain.

The midterm election leaves a trail of disturbing developments in its wake. Fox promised change and the PRI capitalized on the legislative paralysis that prevented him from pushing it through. Polls indicate that 75% of Mexicans say they have little or no confidence in political parties, and 54% of those who voted for Fox three years ago declare themselves dissatisfied with democracy. Sixty percent of the electorate didn’t show up to vote. Given these sentiments, Fox may go down in Mexico’s history as the man who led the democratic transition, and as the president who squandered it.

Denise Dresser, a visiting fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy at USC, is a professor at the Autonomous

Technological Institute of Mexico.