SnapShot
July 7, 2010
In the enclosed newsletter, you'll find my take on the July 4 state elections in Mexico. In light of the violence that has wracked the nation and the tragic murders of candidates in Tamaulipas, I am encouraged by the better than expected turnout (even in Tamaulipas, where the electorate was justifiably on edge) and the results that show Mexico's democracy, though threatened, remains the best option for change.
Also, last week I wrote a commentary for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper about recent events in Tamaulipas and my personal perspective on the tragic assassination of the PRI candidate for governor and my friend, Dr. Rodolfo Torre Cantu. If you are interested in reading that piece, you can link to it here.
I hope you find each piece of interest and I encourage you to let me know your thoughts,
To view the previous issue, please click here.
James S. Taylor
Mexico's Elections: Mild Surprises…and Democracy Marches On
Mexicans went to the polls on Sunday to decide 12 governorships as well as municipal races in 14 states. They did so amid uncertainty and a landscape marred by recent violence, including last week's tragic assassination of the PRI gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas (Rodolfo Torre Cantu). Though only preliminary figures are available at this time, turnout appears to be averaging in the mid-to-high 50% range in most states, a robust participation given the current conditions of Mexico. Though fewer people went to the polls in Tamaulipas and Chihuahua (closer to 40%), the turnout in those states was somewhat higher than expected.
The results of the gubernatorial races held close to pre-election predictions, but not so close that the country's political observers were left without fodder for discussion.
PRI: El Carro Completo?...not so fast
Heading into Sunday's contests, analysts and supporters of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) were so confident of the party's prospects that there was talk of a carro completo – a clean sweep.
And the PRI did fare well, with clear victories in 7 of the gubernatorial races: Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Hidalgo, Quintana Roo, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala and Zacatecas. The party also appears headed for victory in Durango and Veracruz, though challenges in these two states are almost certainly on the horizon.
Despite this impressive showing, however, the PRI's performance was less than the clean sweep analysts had projected and that the party had anticipated coming out of its strong performance in congressional mid-term elections held last year. The PRI, in fact, entered the elections with control of 9 of the 12 governorships up for grabs. In Sunday's vote, the party won the governorship in the same number of states. But what's telling about the results is not where the PRI won, it's where the PRI lost: in Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa—three big states where the party had never before lost a statewide election.
The PRI did score symbolic victories with wins in Aguascalientes and Tlaxcala, both formerly held by the National Action Party (PAN), and Zacatecas, a bastion of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). But no one pretends that these victories offset the unexpected losses the PRI suffered in its former strongholds.
Some analysts have suggested the PRI's losses in three key states signal a weakness the opposition may be able to exploit in future races. Others note that the multi-party coalition faces significant challenges ahead and that the likelihood of their uniting behind a single candidate for the presidential election in 2012 is virtually non-existent.
PAN & PRD: "My Enemy's Enemy is My Friend"… but can they govern?
The party of President Felipe Calderon, the PAN, formed alliances with rival leftist parties and ideological opposites, including the PRD, to contest seven of the gubernatorial races. The coalitions did far better than expected in pulling off upsets in the aforementioned PRI strongholds, and did so with fairly wide margins of victory (ranging from five to eleven percent). Moreover, the coalition candidates made contests out of the races in Durango and Veracruz, states where the PRI had been expected to win handily.
For the leaders of the PAN and PRD, Sunday's results appear to vindicate what many considered a risky decision even to form the coalition. They also may point the way forward for elections next year (including in the state of Mexico, where current governor Enrique Peña Nieto is considered the frontrunner for the PRI's presidential nomination).
But negotiating the power relationships and policy intricacies of a governing coalition is tricky, certainly much more so than what was required of the coalition partners during the campaign, when dislike of the PRI was sufficient to motivate their union.
The PAN and the PRD must take their victories in Sunday's elections where they find them, however, for there is nothing of consolation to be found in the defeats each party suffered in states where its gubernatorial candidates ran alone. The PAN's candidates were resoundingly defeated in the three states where it did not form coalitions: Aguascalientes, Chihuahua and Tamaulipas. And the PRD failed to win the governor's office in Zacatecas for the first time in two elections.
Perspectives from Others
Expert opinions regarding Sunday's election results have begun to emerge. Don't look for confident assessments of the vote or sweeping pronouncements about what the results portend for the 2012 presidential election. It was, as The Economist notes, "a politically inconclusive outcome."
Hector Aguilar Camín, writing in Monday's Milenio, asserts that the election, which was expected to be an easy win for the PRI, turned out to be a "challenge" for the party. Though the PRI assured its return to the top spot in the results column, he goes on, it is in a more competitive environment than anyone suspected prior to the vote.
Shannon O'Neil, Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, affirms that Sunday's results show surprising new dynamics in Mexican politics… "The PAN and PRD were in fact able to form an electoral coalition - a feat that eluded the two parties throughout the 1990s when such a coalition would likely have hastened the country's transition to full-fledged democracy".
Andrew Selee, Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Center noted that the greatest takeaway from the election is that "democracy is surprisingly healthy in Mexico, perhaps more so than many analysts recognize" and though Mexico's democracy may be "imperfect…there do appear to be some mechanisms of accountability at work that allowed these elections to be meaningful referenda on local political performance."