Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Five-month transition

There was some discussion in the Sharing Comparative group about the long time between the presidential election in Mexico and the assumption of office by the winner. The editors at The Economist were considering the same thing.

The waiting game: The perils of a five-month transition

LIFE sometimes moves slowly in Mexico, and the handover of power is no exception… Mexico’s president-elect must wait five months before taking office. For Enrique Peña Nieto, who won July’s presidential election as the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and will take office on December 1st, the lengthy limbo brings risks.

One is a news vacuum. This has given undeserved coverage to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the left-wing candidate who claimed fraud after his narrow defeat in the 2006 election and has done so again after losing by 6.6% this year…

On August 9th the PRI announced that its priority in the new Congress, which starts on September 1st, would be a bundle of rather flimsy-looking measures to fight corruption and make the government’s dealings with the media more transparent.

This will delay more pressing reforms to tax, energy, the labour market and social security, all of which are vital if Mexico is to grow at the 6% that Mr Peña has promised. His aides say there will be progress on these bigger reforms before December. But that requires help from the opposition, since the PRI failed to win a majority in either house of Congress…

Political reform could be the price of the PAN’s co-operation on economic matters. Innovations such as consecutive re-election of congressmen and mayors, or a run-off in presidential elections, are not to Mr Peña’s taste, but they would be good for Mexico’s democracy. So would a shorter transition period.