Fox Has Been Outfoxed, and That Puts Mexican Democracy in Peril

Many Mexicans who voted for Vicente Fox are bewildered. Four years into his term, the man who promised to kick the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, out of power forever now seems to have been kidding. The PRI is coming back, winning state election after state election, and Mexico’s first president elected in a free and fair race doesn’t appear to be doing anything about it. But other Mexicans should, because if the former ruling party returns to office in the next presidential election, in 2006, the country’s democracy will have been short-lived. If the PRI returns, it will come back to stay.

Politics can’t tolerate vacuums, and the PRI is filling the one created by Fox’s failures. Day after day, Mexican newspapers portray a paralyzed country in which very little has changed and even less gets done. Mexicans don’t talk about what Fox has accomplished but about what could have been. Mexico seems to be speaking the vocabulary of disenchantment. The words “failure,” “disillusion,” “lack of leadership” are a daily part of the national conversation. President Fox is less than a lame duck. He’s a dead duck.

Four years ago millions of Mexicans voted for change. They heard Fox’s promises of better government, less corruption and more rule of law -- and believed them. They elected a candidate who would kill the dinosaurs and tame the dragons who had ruled Mexico for 71 continuous years. But he couldn’t or didn’t want to.

Instead of confronting those who had despoiled Mexico, he curled up next to them. Instead of weakening the PRI when he could, he tried to collaborate with it in Congress and refused to take on vested interests in unions that the dominant party had created.

The results of accommodation are there for all to see: an emboldened PRI and a weakened government, a cornered president and two more years of politics as a blood sport. By attempting to co-govern with the PRI, Fox has breathed new life into it. Unwittingly, the president has become the PRI’s secret weapon.

While Fox offers carrots instead of sticks, the PRI has been organizing itself at the state and local levels, retaking ground on the periphery as a way of regaining control of the center.

And as the recent gubernatorial races in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz underscore, the party will resort to fear and loathing on the campaign trail to win. The PRI is using old tricks -- intimidation, vote buying, patronage. And weak electoral institutions combined with low turnout mean those tricks still work.

And work they did for the new mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, elected despite rumors of drug trafficking, a 1995 arrest for smuggling of endangered species and the fact that two of his bodyguards are in jail in the assassination of a prominent journalist. Hank’s victory sent a clear message: In order to win, the PRI doesn’t have to modernize itself, it doesn’t have to change. It can nominate political dinosaurs and still win in Mexico’s new, fragile democracy.

Today, the PRI’s party chairman and presidential hopeful, Roberto Madrazo, is positioning himself as the candidate of those who are disappointed with democracy; of those who believe that power-sharing has been a road to nowhere; of those who prefer the efficient corruption of the PRI to the chronic ineptitude of Fox’s National Action Party. Madrazo is gambling on those who miss the old system of clear rules and predicable complicities. And he has found a constituency among Mexicans who prefer a perfect dictatorship that can get things done to a paralyzed democracy.

But Madrazo’s way is not only the old way. It’s the worst way. The PRI that he has reassembled is not the modernizing, technocratic party that pushed forward Mexico’s much-needed economic restructuring in the 1990s. Madrazo’s PRI is a group of caudillos who view the country as their personal fiefdom and intend to govern it as such. Madrazo’s PRI is a party run by corrupt mafias that are itching to act freely, and will dismantle the country’s few democratic institutions to do so.

Ultimately, what’s at stake for Mexico with the PRI’s return is the viability, the longevity, the survival of Mexican democracy beyond 2006. Because if the PRI comes back, Mexico will slide back from an imperfect democracy to the government it lived with for seven decades. Only worse.