Mexico146;s next revolution

The new president8217;s challenge will be not how to govern with dysfunctional institutions, but how to replace them with something that works

While it might take some days before Mexico8217;s cliff-hanger presidential election is officially settled, it seems almost certain that right-of-centre, liberal candidate Felipe Calderon will be the country8217;s next president. He may not have won by more than a percentage point and his 36 per cent of the vote is hardly a mandate. Still, winning is better than losing, and Mexico is better off today than it was yesterday, when many thought the left-of-centre populist contender, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, would receive a thumping endorsement from the electorate.

Calderon means continuity8230;nonetheless the challenges he faces are enormous. Mexico today is victim of a gaping ideological divide that most other countries in Latin America have put behind them. The election was not over policies, simplistic or not, such as war or peace, lower or higher taxes, more or less public spending, how to combat poverty or create jobs, to permit or prohibit capital punishment, abortion, gay marriage, or whatever. The campaign was over Mexico8217;s soul, over the highly abstract broad ideological themes of nationalism, separation of church and state, the market versus the state, belonging to Latin America or to North America, poor versus rich.

Viewed from afar, such campaign themes might not have been a bad thing: after all, countries need these types of discussion every now and then. But in fact, the discussion was largely meaningless, because the policies that theoretically would have sprung from the electorate favoring one world-view or the other were either unviable or already in place. Calderon cannot hand education over to the Church, privatize Pemex the state owned oil company or abolish social anti-poverty programs, as his adversaries falsely claimed he would do. And Lopez Obrador would not have been able to move Mexico away from the United States, revise NAFTA, massively and overnight re-orient public spending, eliminate poverty, and create millions of jobs through unfunded infrastructure programs, as he said, and truly seemed to believe, he would do.

As in most cases, Byzantine ideological debates such as these lead nowhere, but they do crowd out meaningful policy discussions. Since debates over those policies did not take place, they will have to begin now, and inevitably they will further polarise a society that is already deeply divided.

Calderon will not only be plagued by this artificial ideological divide; he will also have to confront the same paralysis that Fox and his predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, have encountered since 1997. Mexico8217;s current institutions were designed and built for an authoritarian rule, not for democracy, and they worked while Mexico was governed by a single party, the PRI. When democracy came, everyone thought that the same institutions would remain functional, despite a radically different context.

We were all wrong, and the new president must face the same challenge: not how to govern with these dysfunctional institutions, but how to replace them with something that works. This is the single most important challenge facing Calderon; designing and building new institutions should be his first priority.

Achieving, at long last, re-election of parliamentary representatives; calling a referendum to amend the Constitution; creating a hybrid, semi-presidential, semi-parliamentary system that will encourage the formation of legislative majorities in a three-party environment; allowing independent candidates to run for office, thus forcing party realignment; and abolishing the US-style campaign-financing, where air time is purchased instead of allotted, and which led to Sunday8217;s election probably being, dollar for vote, the most expensive in the world.

Story continues below this ad

With these reforms, Mexico can finally begin to harvest the fruits of ten years of stability and continuity. With the reforms, the urgently needed substantive decisions that will directly affect the lives of the Mexicans8212;energy, tax, and labor reform, the improvement of education, and poverty reduction8212;can be made. Without the reforms, the country will continue to plod along and8230;real change will remain impossible.

The writer, a former Foreign Minister of Mexico, is a Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies at New York UniversityProject Syndicate