The elections in Mexico Sunday are no longer only elections for the next president of the country. They are not even, as everyone is saying in some wonder, merely the first really free elections in Mexican history. Instead, the elections constitute a profound referendum on everything from social class to education to a new national style of institutionalization. But lurking behind the curtains that rise so dramatically over that country of 58 million voters Sunday is a mystery: No one knows yet which way the nation will go.
On the plus side, everywhere in Mexico today are the cacophonous voices and contours of the “new Mexico.” In a country where the dominating ruling party, known as PRI, has held total and unequivocal power for 7l years, 55 percent of Mexicans are already governed in their state and local governments by officials of the opposition parties (something that would have been unthinkable before now). A respected new independent election agency will oversee the vote.
Thanks in large part to the North American Free Trade Agreement, but also to the growing and increasingly independent and demanding entrepreneurial middle class, Mexico’s economy is the strongest it has been in the last 50 years. Half of the voters are under 35 and are expected to vote more independently. Poorer, rural voting precincts, which the PRI could so easily manipulate, are giving way to urbanization in all the northern states and many others.
Meanwhile, polls show that people are less afraid of the PRI, noted for its heavy-handedness, and that they are increasingly more optimistic about their lives.
These factors, the argument goes, are the reason the two major candidates, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, of the PRI, and Vicente Fox, of the right-of-center PAN party, are running neck and neck. Indeed, in the past few weeks, the PAN candidate, a 6-foot-3-inch, flashy man from the progressive north with a cowboy manner who used to be a Coca Cola salesman and who calls people “Shorty” or “Wimp,” has seemed to pull ahead of the traditional candidate, who is likable and forceful but burdened with PRI history. (Indeed, in mid-May, a Reuters poll showed Fox ahead of Labastida by 46 percent to 4l percent, a finding that thoroughly rattled the PRI.)
But there is also another Mexico, still mired in the poverty and ignorance of the past and blaming outsiders for its own manifold faults. This Mexico is far from ready to deal with the future and the demands of globalization and education and even reasonable good governance.
In this anti-heroic Mexico, average wages are actually lower than they were in l975, with the gulf between rich and poor becoming a chasm. One-sixth of the country lives on $l a day. Between l996 and l998, the income of the richest tenth of Mexican households rose from 36 percent to 38 percent. During that same period, the poorest 60 percent of households saw their share of the national income fall from 26 percent to 25 percent.
The Inter-American Development Bank in Washington reports that, during the l990s, inequality in wages increased more in Mexico than in any other Latin American country. The remarkable growth rate of an average of 5.l percent a year over the last four years, with manufacturing employment growing by 3 percent a year, has simply not trickled down (or been forced down) to the impoverished classes.
Another development that bodes well for the future is that even sympathetic Americans are telling their Mexican colleagues what is wrong.
In a masterful speech, “Mexico at the Century’s Turn,” before the Mexican Institute of Finance Executives early in June in Monterrey, Abraham F. Lowenthal, professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, first praised the very real progress that Mexico has made. But then he focused on the “three underlying challenges of Mexico in the coming years: equity, education and governance.”
Mexico suffers “profound economic inequalities,” he warned. It has been falling behind in education. It risks “permanent marginality” in exactly that globalized world that it has itself chosen to join, if those inequalities continue. “Improving governance” is the most important issue in this entire campaign.
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Finally, he asks whether the country’s leaders can “develop the attitudes, expectations and practices that are necessary for democratic politics, whether as rulers or opposition? Can the congress learn to function consistently as a forum for responsible decision-making, not mainly as an obstacle to decisions? Can the judiciary rise to the level of its responsibilities, overcoming vested interests and familiar practices?”
Until those troubling questions are answered, Mexico’s main problem, like that of Latin America as a whole, will consist of how to transform the old authoritarian PRI political center into a more appropriate modern system. Mexico’s immense task this election, then, is the redefinition of its statehood.
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