A brief history of the Pact for Mexico is already beginning to take on the shades of a comedy in which the actors forget the script mid-way through the scene, one never knows if it is a rehearsal or the final performance, and the director is a blurry figure lost among the rancor and bickering of the protagonists. In all that media display, there is something of Fellini's winks--or rather, one of his favorite phrases: "the shortest path to absurdity is wanting to appear as real"--and not a little of the unheard warnings of a past that, for being inconceivable, turns out to be simply unrepeatable.
In the 1940s and 50s, the Party of the Mexican Revolution, which became the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI)-- began their six-year initiatives guided by platforms for which the symbol of "National Unity" was the grand rhetorical device to shore up the distance of the presidency from dissimilar political actors and, in particular, from factions within their official party. The evocation of "Unity" served to situate friends and fence in enemies of the presidency, to build the aura of a "president of all the Mexicans", to reward the repentant and punish the obdurate and, above all, to open imaginary (and sometimes real) spaces to those who were outside the 'box'. The lines could be generous or terrible: what was being forged was, in essence, loyalties to the old rules of corporatism.** The president was converted into a "true balance" between "sectors of society".
If the PAN [National Action Party] administrations (between 2000 and 2012) failed at anything, it was precisely to distill this apparent and real meta-sovereignty of presidential respect, especially in political society. During his entire administration, Vicente Fox faced off against the Congress, the governors of the opposition and the government bureaucracy itself. He ended up being a pathetic version of the most defensive and accommodative faction of the conservative Mexican party. Felipe Calderón made the presidency a war machine--a machine that turned into a truckload of illegalities: the delicate and dangerous line that defines the proximity between the political and the criminal.
Partly because of the shock of the PAN's ineptitude and partly because political parties are repetitive bureaucracies, beginning in 2012 the PRI returned to the codes and schemes they already knew--almost, one might say, like a melancholy act. It takes no stretch of imagination or expectation to see a a supra-institutional presidency behind the age-old "National Unity" and the "Pact for Mexico".
However, viewed from the perspective of its first six months in office, the Pact--which included from its conception ninety-five agreements (!) on the scale of education and energy reform--seems more like a catalog of expectations that are not Utopian, but Dystopian. Even a minor chief of the parliamentary faction could have guessed what is happening: each of the parties and the fringes of parties that signed it is cherry-picking their own interpretation in order to position themselves for the coming elections.
However, viewed from the perspective of its first six months in office, the Pact--which included from its conception ninety-five agreements (!) on the scale of education and energy reform--seems more like a catalog of expectations that are not Utopian, but Dystopian. Even a minor chief of the parliamentary faction could have guessed what is happening: each of the parties and the fringes of parties that signed it is cherry-picking their own interpretation in order to position themselves for the coming elections.
In fact, this is an updated version of the old corporatist practices, only now the political parties are found in place of the "social sectors". Let's call it a kind of political neo-corporatism. The question is whether this can work in the Mexico of 2013 (besides, political parties are not "social sectors" for the simple fact that they compete in elections). So far the answer is that something in the Pact could work for the PRI, but certainly not for the country, and even less for political society.
When last Thursday Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong affirmed that the "Pact is going through a severe crisis" due to "internal party confrontations", he did nothing more than to corroborate this possible (budding) neo-corporatist mentality.
Obviously the Pact--that is, the identity card for gaining access, or not, to the presidency--did not cause the crisis of parties, but it certainly worsened it. The debacle of the National Action Party (PAN)--perhaps the worst since 1976--has its origins in calderonismo. The PAN majority does not want to be involved in a party that is about to become a historic syllogism for the memory of a genocide. (Strictly speaking, the only depth solution would be that the PAN itself might bring Felipe Calderón to trial.) The division of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) has a different story, which is linked to the failure of the rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism.
But the effect of the Pact on both parties was to define the groups with access to presidential power well beyond their internal equilibrium, which evidently weakened the structure of both parties. Today, to further weaken already weakened political parties means producing an implosion of the State that does not necessarily have any visible source of political nourishment or compensation.
We must never forget that in Mexican politics what works for the president and works for the State may become operative in some way, but that which works only for the president and not for the State can lead to disaster. Spanish original
*Ilán Semo earned undergraduate and master's degrees at Humboldt University (Berlin), then followed postgraduate studies in the Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Professor in the History Department at Iberoamerican University (Mexico City), his areas of specialization are twentieth century history, intellectual history and contemporary history.
**MV Note: Corporatism refers to a distinct political system that prevailed in Mexico throughout most of the twentieth century under the rule of the PRI, the Party of the Institutional Revolution. The 1929 Calles Pact (President Plutarco Elías Calles) was the beginning of a system for controlling the citizenry by means of group or 'corporate' entities, such as workers, unions, farmers, and social organizations, which were so structured as to hinder the development of truly democratic institutions and a functioning civil society.
Corporatism is characterized by the idea that society should be based not on isolated individuals, but on corporations; i.e., organized groups, controlled from above, that structure the social order based on their social and economic functions. Each organization [corporation] represents a group with a common function in the social division of labor, and individuals act with others through the organizations to which they belong.
At the political level, the state is organized based on citizens as represented by corporations, not as individual voters. These corporations also exercise control functions over their members. In economics, corporatism was hostile to liberal capitalism for its excessive focus on individualism. Corporatists promoted a system that combined private property with state management and ownership to replace competitive market forces. They termed this arrangement "The Third Way".