JULY 2010 EDITION: Business & Politics Outlook
Political Thermometer
Opinion polls were accurate this time since there were few surprises in the elections for twelve governorships and legislative and mayoral elections in fourteen states of Mexico. This is the first round of state and municipal elections that resulted from the constitutional reform that established the first Sunday of July as the official election date on any given year in which an election will take place. This constitutional reform intends to harmonize Mexico’s electoral calendars, to increase order in the electoral process and to avoid excessive campaign spending. These elections were threatened by violence, which was spurred by organized crime groups. The assassination of Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) candidate for governor of the state of Tamaulipas, a few days before election day, created a climate of anxiety and uneasiness. Such assassination was a serious yet, fortunately, isolated event. Nearly 30 million people cast their votes without any serious incident to regret. In general terms, it appears that Mexican democracy overcame the threat of organized crime. Interestingly, the results of these elections produced several winners. The most visible winner is the PRI, which recovered the states of Aguascalientes and Tlaxcala from the National Action Party (PAN), and Zacatecas, from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), in addition to maintaining its grip on Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, Quintana Roo, Hidalgo, Veracruz and Durango. On the other hand, the political alliance between the PAN, the PRD, the Labor Party (PT) and Convergence won in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, which were previously under PRI rule. The alliance parties considered their strategy as notably triumphant. Such parties intended to defeat the PRI in states that were the PRI’s strongholds. These political alliances worked in these three states because they interrupted the PRI’s hegemony in such states. The strategy that consisted in joining forces, even among parties in opposite extremes of the political spectrum, for instance PAN on the right and the PRD/PT and Convergence on the left, was sufficient to defeat the PRI, which claimed victory in nine other states. The interpretations of these elections will be very different. Nevertheless, the central question proposed by analysts in political editorials and discussions in coffee shops is whether the PAN and the PRD will join forces to defeat the PRI in the next presidential elections of 2012. Between these elections and the 2012 presidential elections, next year’s elections in the State of Mexico are important not only because of such state’s strategic, economic, industrial and geopolitical importance but because its current governor, PRI’s Enrique Pena Nieto, has a significant lead according to opinion polls conducted on the public’s preferences as to potential presidential candidates to succeed President Felipe Calderon. In the meantime, the recent elections cooled off Mexico’s political temperature and there appears to be no sign, as many predicted, of legal confrontations as a result of the recent electoral outcome.