Federico Reyes Heroles
Dinner to close out a high-level meeting of Mexican business leaders. Keynote speaker: Anne Applebaum, the well-known author of “The End of Democracy”. A journalist and historian who, partly due to her family background, has specialized in covering the transitions in Eastern Europe since her time at Yale University and in her role as a correspondent for *The Economist*. Down-to-earth despite her fame, Applebaum doesn’t shy away from the topic.
She began her remarks with a change of plans: “I was going to talk to you about my book, but it turns out that today Orbán is meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. That deserves special consideration.” Orbán, she continued, “is the inventor of a new form of government: extortion.” The Mexican businesspeople and their wives listened with some surprise. And she continued: Orbán is today the chief advisor to the man who will be the next president of the United States, Mexico’s main trading partner, and its relentless neighbor. How does Orbán operate?—she asked herself—it’s very simple. If any of you have, for example, a mining concession and a radio station, you’ll receive a call—discreet but timely—telling you to either tone down the political content on your station, or we’ll have to review your mining concession as well.
Silence among the businesspeople. According to some of them, they were already suffering from this mechanism. It was extortion and the dismantling of institutions that allowed Orbán to remain in power for 16 years; it worked. Masked behind the Alliance of Young Democrats, and wielding the sword of crude nationalism, he promoted a very attractive policy: tax cuts, the reintroduction of universal benefits, and a reduction in the deficit, which, at its worst, had reached 4.5%—where do we stand in Mexico?—and so on. At first, it worked. The deficit fell, public debt decreased, the administration was reorganized with the popular goal of saving money, there was economic growth, but—and this is a big but—Orbán took the following steps toward autocracy: he reduced the National Assembly’s capacity for oversight and control; the plan included eliminating qualified majorities so he could govern with simple majorities; he sought to expand the powers of the prime minister—that is, himself—and, as a final lock, he threw himself into controlling the media and persecuting opponents. Fortunately, the Constitutional Court put the brakes on some of his authoritarian initiatives. There was that counterweight.
It all sounded far away from Mexico, as we turned a blind eye and avoided seeing the authoritarian advance that was already upon us. But the barrage continued in Mexico: illegal control of the legislature; the disappearance of an independent and professional judiciary; open persecution of free journalism (see Article 19’s “Bullet Machine”), or the cases in Campeche, Veracruz, and other states; and, finally, contempt for public service professionals, for the law, and for public opinion.
As for his signature tactic, extortion—let’s not even go there. In Mexico, every “social aid” package comes labeled and with a warning: “This is given to you by…” But social programs were already in the Constitution! And what about the presidential “megaphone” serving lies as a government strategy? Economic spillover? Fires in Dos Bocas? The collapse of the Maya Train? The derailment of the Interoceanic Railway? How strange. It’s the harvest of improvisation. Corruption? What corruption? ¡Ah, La Barredora! Let them present evidence. But what about the authorities—aren’t they there for that? The disappeared? It’s biased, intentional information—pure interventionism.
But everything comes to an end: Orbán suffocated his own supporters.
The opposition succeeded: it ousted Orbán from power, and that, in itself, is good news. Putin and Trump, his open allies, also lost. The extortionist autocrat is leaving. And for Mexico, it’s a breath of fresh air. It can be done.
What must the businesspeople who have suffered extortion be thinking of with the approval to freeze accounts without prior trial or the PPO?
It sounds like extortion, doesn’t it?
Further Reading: