Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Señora Presidenta?

It's not just in Russia that a woman is making headlines as a high ranking political figure.

A flash in the PAN

TWO of Latin America’s three biggest economies, Brazil and Argentina, are headed by women… Might Mexico make it a clean feminist sweep next year? The ruling National Action Party (PAN) has been struggling to find a popular candidate for the presidential election in 2012… The opposition has mocked the PAN’s hopefuls as the “seven dwarves”… But polls suggest that Josefina Vázquez Mota, the PAN’s leader in the Chamber of Deputies, is emerging as a possible technicolour candidate.

Ms Vázquez has almost doubled her support among PAN sympathisers since January…

As social-development minister under Mr Calderón’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, Ms Vázquez cleared out incompetent officials…

Ms Vázquez says that as president education would be her priority, with wider access to secondary school and university, and better teacher-training. She talks of a more efficient justice system (with a focus on everyday impunity and corruption, rather than the drug war), but is so far short on specifics. Like most in the conservative PAN she is against abortion; on gay marriage, recently legalised in Mexico City, she equivocates. She talks of the need to strengthen Mexico’s weak governmental institutions to match the country’s achievement of full democracy in 2000…

That will be one line of attack against the PAN’s principal rival, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran Mexico with an iron fist for 71 years. Reminding people of the faults of that era, without boring younger Mexicans by banging on about a past they don’t remember, will be key to preventing the PRI from returning next year, she says.

It will be an uphill battle. The PRI’s most likely candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, is 30 or 40 points ahead of Ms Vázquez in most polls. After a decade of sluggish economic growth and five years of drug-war violence, voters are fed up with the PAN…

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Labels: gender, leadership, Mexico, politics