Antonio Navalón
When Winston Churchill decided to write his memoirs – he must have been about three years old, given the sense of significance he had since he was a child and the conviction that he would make history – he decided to title the first volume, which explained everything that had happened before the outbreak of World War II, ” Towards the Storm.” There, naturally, he explained the germ and the foundations that built and gave rise to the Second World War. The consequences of the Treaty of Versailles are well known; the humiliation of Germany, the absurdity, and the extent to which the greed and lack of common sense of the victors can lead. The disaster was seen coming, and it arrived. Who did or what provoked the arrival to power of a man like Adolf Hitler? Undoubtedly all those who thought it was more important to bring the German people to their knees than to put them on the path of rectification and awareness that excesses and dictators would only lead them to total destruction. The civilized world, that is, the winners of the war or the holders of the power of the empires at that time were wrong. And, as a consequence of their mistake, the world found itself facing the most incredible carnage in its history.
For us Mexicans, the year begins not towards the storm but into the storm. It is written that people who follow a guide – even if his name is Moses – have to be very careful because it can reach a point where conversations with God or the fact of being the recipients of the commandments, can create mental problems and confuse what one says to oneself with what God tells him to govern his people. The year begins with the biggest battle of institutions that the country remembers in many years. The fight between the political reality – which displaces the Government and the President – and the INE, is the most significant proof that every human work is imperfect by definition. But it is also a fight that enlivens the argument that building takes centuries and destroying can be done in a second.
We needed sixty years to have the capacity and the social and political will to create an organization that would resolve the great question of who is really in charge when it comes to the will of the people. Or, in other words, who can steal the minutes, burn the ballots and make the systems collapse. There was a social consensus as rarely had been achieved, and that consensus – like the foundations of World War II – was established by thousands of big and small abuses whose climax was the collapse of the system in 1988. I will spare any comment on the aesthetics of what it means that the hero of the collapse of the system is now one of the reference points of the moral regeneration of the country. I will not be the one to deny, whoever he is, his capacity for repentance and his power for reconversion. However, it is curious how the apostle of the country’s energy sovereignty and creator of the system’s downfall – or at least nominally responsible for it – is getting stronger and more powerful every day. And while all this is happening, the mechanism and institution created to give voice, sustenance, but above all security to the country’s democracy, the Federal Electoral Institute – or better known today as INE – is getting weaker and weaker and with fewer capabilities and support to act.
Democracy has a point of no return, which consists in trusting or not trusting the results. For that – in the time of the glorious IFE and the historic José Woldenberg – an instrument was built and consolidated, which is the common patrimony of Mexicans and which, with all the structural defects that every human work entails, guaranteed that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to steal votes or manipulate us. The sentimental value of the IFE – today INE – is superior to the historical or political fight. I know people who have their first credential as a free voter framed in the place of honor in their homes. Mexican democracy is worth the guarantee that its reflection is honest; that is why it is so important not to play Russian roulette with what makes the difference.
The only thing that differentiates barbarism from the whim or the omnipotent will of one man is the strength of institutions. To build them, as is well known, is very difficult; to keep them in top shape is very complicated; to destroy them, however, is very easy. I am ashamed to pay taxes and belong to a country where the President of one of the powers understands that what must be done is to criminally sue the INE board members who had the audacity to discuss, think or dare to think above the single thought of the absolute leader. They cannot know more than the one who obtained the solidarity and the will of more than thirty million Mexicans who invested him with the unique power not only to govern but also to rewrite history and destroy what he considers necessary to build a country that no longer comments even with himself.
The fight unleashed is a fight that exceeds and goes beyond the revocation of mandate. It is a fight that affects the very solvency of the structure of the democratic system. It is a fight that, in the end, we have all already lost, since by questioning INE and its board members so much and in such a way – for reasons so different from the fulfillment of their functions – we have called them into question, at least for a part of the population. Meanwhile, the other part of the population, the one with a survival instinct, understands that there must be limits to the omnipotent will of men and that it is better for INE to change what it has to change but remain an institution of all Mexicans. Meanwhile, as human beings repeat over and over again the same schemes, we are witnessing the implosion of the Government party and of the regime itself. Right now, there is already competition and a direct struggle between them. Moreover, I can say that the main enemy that MORENA will have in the recall, in the next elections, and in any democratic exercise from now on, will be MORENA.
It is very difficult for a poll to solve a candidate selection process. But it is even more difficult if that party is made either by the sum of the sinners of all the others or as a resistance fund of a political class that has already used all the artifices of power. And the worst thing is that suddenly, without falling off the horse, but above all, without leaving office, on the road to the Damascus of the 4T, they realized that they were believers. It is not known in what and for what, but I find it comfortable to think that – even though they know that they are not the candidates chosen by the one in charge – they have decided to die on their feet and not to surrender or get down on their knees in front of the poll. For that reason, what people like Ricardo Monreal, Marcelo Ebrard, or the others involved are doing, I consider more than a lesson of political interest, a sample of democratic civism.
A new year begins. A key year. Not because of the revocation of the mandate to be held, but because this is the year to respond and find out what the institutions in Mexico are for and how they can survive. I only suspect that a political system based on a single will is terrible by definition. But make no mistake, the current confrontation with INE is only the most visible part of the storm of institutions in which we are trapped. Today it is INE, and tomorrow it will be the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation since, at the end of the day, what we have to know is that what we are discussing here is the vision of one who knows what is in the best interest of the country over the country versus the rules of the game to impose that vision. In other words, there can be nothing and no one, no law, nothing that opposes the designs of the Lord. And while he no longer comes down from Mount Sinai with the written tablets of the Law, he can perfectly well burn half of MORENA within his worship of the golden calf. A worship that also implies pretending that the poll that has been chosen as the best system by those who can elect and impose should be substituted by that neoliberal and decadent exercise of electing the best candidates for each position.
Among other things, the great question that the nation has to answer in 2022 is whether it wants a country of institutions or a country of one man. Democracy can be enriched, it can be modified, and it can be adapted. There will come a day when they will not put indelible inks on us, but biometric tests will give us access to participate in the process. But what we cannot do is make democracy by resting the will of all on the absolute truth of one.
