Luis Rubio
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: the world of fantasy and common sense, two sides of the same coin. Don Quixote prefers morals to advance his causes and considers common sense a waste of time and energy. Sancho Panza warns his master that the giant he desires to attack is only a windmill and, as such, should be left in peace. Abandoning his sensibility, that is, his common sense, afforded Don Quixote the freedom to involve himself in futile tasks such as setting upon windmills. In the end, the “long-armed giants” keep the population sufficiently satisfied and distracted for them to forget their quotidian problems. But those problems do not disappear: they prophesy the next disillusion, fall, and disappointment. Or worse.
At this stage, there is evidence of at least two convincing elements in the president’s manner of leading the nation. The first of these is that his objective is his popularity and not that of attending to or resolving the problems or the affairs of the country or those he promised to tackle when he was a presidential candidate. The second is that his ability to preserve that popularity has so far been exceptional. The tone, content, and discursive manner that bring him ever closer to the popular base and glean support for him are, at least in statistical terms, extraordinary. It is not that this support is superior to that of many of his predecessors, but it does entail a unique characteristic: it is personal. The connection is not that of the traditional politician, remote at the Mount Olympus of power, but instead that of the witty president who is near to the heart of the Mexican Everyman.
But all coins have two sides. The rhetoric, the popularity, and the support have been real, at least until recently. The problem with the scheme is that the country demands effective solutions and full attention to concrete problems. While the president harangues, predicates, and defames, the real-world forges ahead and, in this XXI century, the pace of the advance is dramatic, to the degree that the true alternative is being within the process or being left out (almost) definitively.
The evidence of this other side of the coin is unimpeachable and follows its own overwhelming logic. Suffice to mention some of the matters dominating today’s world: artificial intelligence, renewable energy, 5G infrastructure, genetics and biotechnology, and added value on the part of processes of high intellectual content (no longer manual). The countries that are within the process invest in educative systems and all that this entails, to prepare their populations for a world that distances itself every day from the existing one; they develop infrastructure for the highest possible connectivity and approach universal coverage of access to the Internet networks; they build health systems designed not only to deal with immediate crises such as the pandemic but also to become the touchstone that transforms an unequal society and one without many opportunities into the foundation of a modern nation in the course of one generation.
Instead of making headway in the construction of a better future for the population, especially the neediest, many of whose votes tipped the election toward the president in 2018 and who continue to back him, the real governmental project, the one that actually exists, does nothing other than perpetuating expectations that can never be fulfilled because there is no foundation for it. The contrast between what is required and what is truly accomplished as a government is striking and astonishing.
In a landmark study on India, Bhagwati and Panagariya* argue that only high economic growth rates, within a market-friendly scheme, permit breaking with the vicious cycle of poverty to build virtuous cycles of development. Handouts, so dear to the heart of the present government, do no more than postponing solutions and render them increasingly farther removed and difficult. The preference for popularity over development entails much greater consequences than those of a government lost in itself could fathom.
“It is tempting, says the Basque parliamentarian, Borja Sémper, that in this high-speed world, it would seem more effective to join forces with the strategy of populism and deriding moderation. Playing by the rules of radicalism, pretending to triumph in the marketplace of ire and fear would perhaps be easier, but it is a lost bet. The center today is the person, and this world cannot limit this person to closed, identitary, or uniformizing spaces according to 20th-century ideas. We live in an era of online political systems and societies. We need not fall into populist radicalism to triumph over populism; we do not need defensive barriers, but instead expansive ones.”
Mexico’s demography is placing us dangerously near the point at which the largest historical contingent is found intersecting with the working age. Countries that incorporate that population into the labor markets with significant human capital (education and health) will be relatively wealthy for the collective benefit. The others will end up aging and poor. A dilemma that will haunt Mexico forever.
An old Chinese proverb says that three things never return: the arrow launched, the word pronounced, and the lost opportunity. Mexico is moving against all three factors.
*Why Growth Matters
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