Editorial: A win for good sense (July 19, 2006)

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion — Francis Bacon, Essays Civil and Moral

Presidential elections in Mexico on July 2 have left the country with a near-deadlock between National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Calderon received 14 million votes, 36.4% of the votes counted, Lopez Obrador 13.6 million (35.3%), with Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a distant third at 8.3 million (21.6%).

Nobody likes close elections, but nobody likes them less than the guy that finishes second. Lopez — who had said in television interviews he would respect the result of the election even if it was decided “by only one vote,” has spent the last two weeks orchestrating an extra-electoral campaign to discredit the result, using equal measures of disinformation, intimidation, bluster, and whining.

That is wildly unfair, especially to the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the 16-year-old governing body created by constitutional reforms that broke the hold of the PRI — the old brokerage party that controlled Mexican politics for seven decades — on the Mexican electoral system. Electoral observers, both Mexican and foreign, have certified that the election was done to high democratic standards, and have, over the IFE’s short history, heaped praise on the institution for its overhaul of the Mexican voting process.

But Lopez and his supporters can’t imagine the PRD losing, and are ready to bash the system if it means they won’t have to face what happened. It would be tragic for Mexico to have a good institutional system impugned and a working democracy weakened.

Lopez’s demand that the IFE hold a ballot-by-ballot recount, for example — endorsed by many in the liberal First World press — would be contrary to Mexican electoral law, in which only a court can order a recount. He claimed that three million ballots had not been reported — when in advance of the election all parties, including the PRD, had accepted an IFE caution that disputed ballots would not be added to the preliminary totals, but counted only for the official result (due no later than Sept. 6). PRD bosses in northern states, where Calderon was strongest, delayed signing off on results, so that results from PRD strongholds in the south came in first, creating the impression that Lopez was winning and that a late-night surge from Calderon was an IFE contrivance. Lopez’s videos of supposed electoral irregularities are hokey, but many in other countries swallow them and the PRD’s other tales whole, finding it impossible to think a leftist politician would lie. (Not surprisingly, Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vicente Rangel is spouting the myths too. Consider the source.)

Thus we have the liberal-left voices in the developed world calling for recounts, in considerable ignorance of both Mexican law and the facts of the election. Lopez’s fellow travellers and useful idiots should stop, listen and learn before shooting their mouths off.

We think Mexico is strong enough to beat this nonsense back, thanks to well-built institutions. There is a world of difference between noisy demonstrations and Lopez’s supporters’ threats of “war” and “making the country ungovernable.”(The PAN looks to be the leading party in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. If Lopez wanted an ungovernable Mexico, all he had to do was win the presidency.)

In Calderon, Mexicans have an unromantic pragmatist — some will want to say a technocrat, with both good and bad implications. But that is to underrate the man whose father was one of the founders of the PAN and who has spent much of his life fighting the old system. It is not wholly coincidence that the real opponents of the old corruption are pro-capitalist.

In Lopez Obrador, Mexicans would have got a populist and leftist who had not — despite much spin to the contrary — broken with the PRI. His inner circle is heavy with names from PRI administrations of the last 30 years. His policies, so far as he had any beyond name-calling, consisted of the old big-government nostrums for creating jobs through hefty public spending. For industry — but most of all for tied-down, capital-intensive resource industry — that would have led to cash suction, or Venezuelan-style “partnership.”

We’re optimistic for Mexico’s future under a Calderon administration, then, and see it as a place where it will become easier, not harder, for mining firms to work. Populism came close, but it suffered a defeat: one that will be good for all Mexicans.

Politicians like Lopez don’t come out of nowhere. Mexican business, which in the PRI days was not always clearly distinguishable from government, is often described as an economic oligarchy and the super-rich and super-poor both exist. Many people have an inbuilt sympathy for populist rhetoric when it tells them they’d be richer if it weren’t for all the crooks around them.

Much of the Mexican lower class didn’t buy that this time around; PAN, portrayed by many First World observers as a party of the white, Catholic upper middle class, attracted as much support as the PRD in poor districts. The split in Mexico is less between classes than between nortenos and surenos, and the choice less between ideologies than between opportunity and dependency.

Jorge Castaneda, a former foreign minister and unimpeachably a man of the Mexican left, has been the clearest of anyone, saying (in a column in The Washington Post) that Lopez Obrador “wants to be president at all costs, not to have his platform implemented.” Nor to have a fair and transparent election, nor either to have an IFE that is independent and free of both partisan intimidation and government interference.

Lopez Obrador is the candidate of the bad old days, and — under a new yellow banner — the bad old PRI. We hope the part of Mexico that is not yet ready to leave that behind comes to its senses soon.