The Mexican democratic system is barely 25 years old and participating political players are still learning to play the game.
The original idea that started in 1992 was, mainly, to break up the power monopoly the then ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had amassed since it was incepted in 1929.
The PRI was seen as a solution to the woes the Mexican Revolution left behind, mainly a badly splintered nation with leaders everywhere who when they did not get what they wanted, the rose up in arms.
The PRI was the result of a consensus among political leaders in every state of the republic to lay down arms and bring peace and hopefully social prosperity to all. The PRI came after the Catholic Church rose up in arms in 1926 to fight a three-year-old battle to reinstitute its power and take the nation back to the years before 1857, when the Catholic Church literally ran the nation.
PRI was made of many ideological factions ranging from raving right-wing fascists to raving communists. Yet the “government of the Revolution” managed over the years to retain power through a system of moving personalities in which there was no reelection, assuring that there would not be a strongman becoming a dictator.
Elections were always rigged and it became “custom” to see PRI win every time in every municipal, state and federal election.
Yet in the 1976 presidential election, people showed their total discontent with the one party dictatorships very much in the Mexican style of no reelection when PRI candidate José López Portillo ran uncontested, not so much because he had no contenders, but as a general protest against the partisan dictatorship. Very few people voted then, bringing about a not-so-imaginary “absentees’ party” who refused to play the one party system game anymore.
The real problem for PRI back then was that the forces at be, both from left, center and right, thought the nation was very much part of the system and they began splintering from PRI to seek new alternatives to a real democracy.
This brought about a radical change, particularly in the powerful left-wing that broke away from PRI to form many little parties. But there were also right-wing parties who splintered all of them, demanding an open democracy.
The leftists managed to get their act together and in 1988 then ran on a unity platform through the National Democratic Front, pitting the son of former leftist president Lázaro Cárdenas against the PRI appointee Carlos Salinas de Gortari. When PRI saw that the balloting was not favorable, and with the Interior Secretariat operated by now Senator Manuel Bartlett, they decided to be up to modern times. As votes were being counted with computers, Bartlett came up with a new language that made Mexicans both laugh at the cynicism of bluntly stealing an election and angry because PRI had done it again:
“The computer system crashed.”
Carlos Salinas de Gortari won that election but the fraud only came to stir the already growing discontent among the politicized people of Mexico.
The four years that ensued were very much of negotiations to figure out how to make the vote count honest and ensure that the best way political parties (PRI included) govern through honest elections.
It was then legislated that all political trends should have a chance to participate and that the government should not run any electoral process. The Federal Electoral Institute (INE) was created through government subsidies for all parties in 1992 and it has been running elections ever since.
Yet over the years the inclusion of many a small political party — seen at first as a bonanza for all political points of view — has done what nobody foresaw 25 years ago: badly splinter the vote with all elections recently being marked by one dent: there are no majority elected officials nowadays.
This means that in this lapse of time the vote went from one controlling party to many little parties in which the voice of a majority is muffled by minorities galore and with presidential candidates winning by as little as half percent of the vote. In fact, the last two presidents, Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, have been minority presidents.
Times have changed and it took a generation to bury the corpse of the old PRI — which is still alive and kicking. But that created lots of little parties that don’t have the quorum to be a majority.
The idea of holding runoff election to avoid the rule of a minority — as PRI is nowadays — is pretty much in the air and seems like an imminent answer to the quagmire the Mexican electoral system is stuck in nowadays. But though a good idea, such as it is in France nowadays, Peña Nieto is against it, so it looks like holding runoff elections is not an option, for now.
Yet the electoral system is stuck at least for the upcoming 2018 presidential elections, when surely the next minority president will be elected.
That, however, is seen by many a voter as being no longer an option and having a president that is elected by a majority — even if in runoff elections — seems to be the way of the future.
Maybe!