‘Mexico Demands Better,’ Fox Says in Midterm Speech

President Vicente Fox, in an unusually self-critical assessment following midterm election losses, admitted Monday night that too many Mexicans are out of work, trapped in poverty, preyed on by criminals and distrustful of a government they consider ineffective.

“Mexico demands better results,” Fox said in his annual state-of-the-nation address, urging opposition parties to help him get promised economic reforms through a deadlocked Congress. “Mexico demands national policies, not factional politics.”

Fox said his administration would withhold salary increases next year for its senior officials as it makes “an unprecedented effort” to stimulate an economy with Mexico’s highest jobless rate in five years.

He also announced an expanded federal role in the effort to solve the murders of more than 260 poor, young women in the city of Ciudad Juarez over the last decade -- a law-enforcement failure that has subjected Mexico to growing criticism.

The president’s 95-minute speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress and televised live to the nation, cast aside the relentless optimism of his previous addresses. The somber, downbeat tone reflected his center-right party’s humbling setback in July legislative elections.

Fox has been under pressure from opposition leaders since then to acknowledge his failures as a step toward overcoming the partisan hostilities that have marred the first half of his six-year term.

Fox has had difficulty winning support in a Congress dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until he took office in December 2000. The midterm vote cost his National Action Party 51 seats in the 500-seat lower Chamber of Deputies, reducing its total to 151 seats, compared with the resurgent PRI’s 225. Some commentators now dismiss Fox, who is ineligible for reelection, as a lame duck.

But the president’s aides said he viewed the turnover in Congress, which held its first session Monday, as a new opportunity for compromise on his top two legislative priorities: boosting revenue by overhauling the tax code and opening the electricity sector to private investment.

In the last 10 days, Fox has been meeting with leaders of the PRI and smaller opposition parties -- something he had done only sporadically until now. “We’re going to see a president more and more involved in these negotiations,” said a Fox spokesman, Agustin Gutierrez Canet.

In his speech, Fox said Mexico needed $50 billion in investment over the next decade to avoid crippling energy shortages. Much of the money could be drawn from private sources without giving up state control of energy production, he said, rejecting assertions by PRI lawmakers that the change would amount to privatization.

Fox said no party could benefit from a further delay of his energy and tax reforms.

“Let us accept negotiation as an essential political practice and not as an act of weakness,” he declared. “Dialogue and agreements will strengthen everyone, to the extent that they benefit the country.”

The new PRI leader in the lower house, Elba Esther Gordillo, made a similar appeal Monday, warning lawmakers that “nobody wins if Mexico loses.” But she faces resistance in her party to deal-making with Fox.

Scattered jeers greeted parts of Fox’s speech, such as a pledge to protect small farmers against subsidized U.S. agricultural exports. “People are dying of hunger!” one lawmaker shouted.

More than half of Mexico’s 102 million people are officially designated as poor. Fox said his administration’s expanding welfare programs and low-inflation policies had reduced poverty, but not enough. The aim of his reforms, the president said, is to free up public spending so the government can do more.

“We cannot consider ourselves a just Mexico while communities exist without minimal basic services, while thousands of people emigrate in search of better lives,” he said. “The gravity of the problem is a call to our consciences. If we do not manage to take steps together to overcome it, we will have left the greatest of our duties undone.”

Fox chided his ministers for being inefficient, bickering among themselves and giving politicians a bad name. He said he would soon send a batch of reform proposals to Congress to overhaul a political system designed for one-party rule.

Among other things, the bills would allow members of Congress to be reelected -- to make them more accountable to voters -- and oblige them to be in session more than the current five months. Mexicans living abroad would get the right to vote in national elections.

Fox also said he would “continue insisting” that the Bush administration reach an agreement with Mexico to legalize the status of millions of Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. and make it easier for others to cross the border as guest workers.