Luis Rubio
How strange is the course of action of the government in legislative matters. Despite being able to count on wide-ranging majorities in both chambers, Morena party adherents tend to blunder due to the lack of clarity of the bills dispatched by the Executive Branch. No one can doubt the despotic and frequently arbitrary nature of the procedures of that party, for whose members the search for votes on the part of other parties and even broad consensus is anathema. But none of that explains the inconstancy, if not fickleness, of the initiatives they demand to be processed.
I explain myself: the prominent characteristic of the world of international relations is the ambiguity of the rules because, in the absence of a world government, the capacity does not exist to obligate the nations to comply, a circumstance that confers wide latitude to the nations with the most significant power. That explains the frequent instability evidenced by diverse regions and the propensity for conflict that is connatural in human relations.
Something similar takes place with governments that do not have strong institutions in that there, too, the law of the strongest tends to prevail: a presidency without counterweights, organized crime, or all the individuals and special interests who de facto enjoy broad impunity.
Although the rules of the international world may be ambiguous and impossible to comply with, they do indeed exist and may be found duly codified because governments have an interest in order being preserved and in the avoidance of unjustified war-like conflagrations. These also have a place at the national level, where the combination of formal and informal rules constitutes a framework for internal political life. Of course, the more informal the rules, the less predictable and more prone they are to create uncertainty. And therein lies the relevant issue for Mexico.
Mexico is a country given to codifying rules in a natural fashion as if their mere presence would guarantee coexistence and progress. An old maxim says that the Stone Age did not end because stones were likely to run out: the same can be said of the selfsame Mexican proclivity for passing laws, reforming them, and never abiding by them. What is rarely considered is the cost of having so many laws, regulations, and procedures, many of these contradictory, which are ignored when convenient for the president-in-turn. Worse yet is when those laws are modified to justify actions that the Executive Branch had already decided to undertake anyway.
But none of that explains the peculiar way that diverse legislation has been advanced in the current government. Typical of Mexican administrations is how they commence with a plethora of initiatives that they later attempt to convert into changes at the level of reality. That has not been the path of the present government, whose legal bills appear to spring forth more from whims or, even more archetypally, from the sudden recognition that not all is going the government’s way, in which case new instruments are required not for the general good, but instead for a concrete and specific purpose as if a series of circumstances, actions, and decisions would change the surrounding reality, obliging the modification of the regulatory framework.
That is my hypothesis regarding the origins of the modifications against the electoral institutions. It is well known that the President blames the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) for his defeat in 2006 and that, henceforth, he has harbored grudges that manifest themselves in the legislation that is now before the Senate. However, this circumstance has been valid since December 2018, when a negotiation would have been more propitious concerning what could and should be modified. A reform against the current and without the slightest interest in building a consensus reveals other concerns: the most probable is the growing dearth of certainty regarding a clean win in 2024. Another possibility, one which I heard from Niall Ferguson on another topic, is that “authoritarians are always afraid of their own populations.” Thus, it is not impossible that however much the President bandies about his popularity, in his heart of hearts, he has misgivings about the voters’ loyalty on the day his successor is elected. Both factors would justify in the collective mind of Morena any modification that ensures a triumph, independently of what the voters might prefer or what the opposition can articulate.
In this manner, the President is mired in the quest for legislating the victory of the Morena candidate in 2024, a version that is more advanced (but also more primitive) of the traditional PRIist finger jerk. Why waste time in elections well organized by professional functionaries when the only thing that matters is for the Morena precandidates to be campaigning around (currently prohibited by law) unhindered, so that whomever the President designates would win outright and become the new Tlatoani, Nahuatl for the ruler, like in the old times?
From this perspective, it makes all the sense in the world not only to weaken the electoral institutions, but also to eliminate them entirely. And now that they’re at it, they could eliminate the Supreme Court and the legislature. After all, one person can do it all.
@lrubiof
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