The bitch is back
Nowadays this is a common phrase you can listen while
walking in the streets, stalking people on facebook and hanging out with your
friends. As you might have guessed, I am speaking of the victory of Enrique
Peña Nieto over López Obrador and Josefina Vázquez Mota. The margin was not as
wide as most pollsters had predicted: EPN got 38.21 %, AMLO 31.59% and JVM
25.41 %. Mitofsky and Milenio’s polls expected a double-digit margin over the
second place. The elections of the Senate and the Deputies showed similar
results. However PAN came second in the former and fared better in the latter’s election.
I
was not quite surprise by the results. Working in the Chamber of Deputies and
having access to different polls, I was expecting a difference of around 8
percent; instead it was just 6.7 percent. Also I have to admit I was not
shocked by the attitude of the defeated candidate AMLO, who denounced (again)
the election.
AMLO
also asked a full recount of the ballot boxes. More than half were recounted, and paradoxically this process gave Peña Nieto 147 thousand
extra votes. In contrast, AMLO and Josefina just got 18 and 88 thousand more
votes respectively.
What
surprised me the most about this particular election is how AMLO was able to
capture the vote of the young people. It is clear that there is a negative correlation
between “radicalness” and age, the younger you are the likelier you are going
to vote for leftist options. However, AMLO’s proposals were everything but
modern. Moreover he was compared to former populist ex-presidents like Echeverría
(from 1970-1976) and López Portillo (from 1976-1982), obviously PRI
ex-presidents.
Most
people cannot see the similarities between AMLO and the “revolutionary” PRI
politicians, but those become evident once he actively supported Manuel
Bartlett’s (yes, he’s the one who “rigged” the election against the
presidential candidate of the antecessor of PRD in 1988) candidacy for the
Senate on PRD’s ticket. The opposition of both against modernizing reforms and
their preference for more state intervention placed them in the field of
nationalists, who were displaced by the neoliberals since 1982; the year in which the “Scientifics”
took over the PRI.
Another
thing that resembles to the nationalist (and economically irresponsible) PRI is
his proposal of eliminating university admission tests, his opposition to labor
and energy reforms and his illogical budget cuts. This proposals made him a candidate stuck in
the past and obssesed with populist measures which would put the country backwards.
Paradoxically his campaign motto was “vote for the real change”. Who was going
to predict that clearly outdated proposals were going to be considered “progressive”
these days? One more thing is his attitude towards democracy: when he wins, it is
a victory of the people, but when he loses it is because of the elite’s
intromission and their fraudulent elections.
To
me the fact that young people are so infatuated by these unrealistic promises, and also their saying that the rest of the Mexicans are stupid for not voting for AMLO is
the real question. Mexico is clearly not a democratic country, but not because
the PRI won, as some leftist are saying, but because people do not trust institutions, but the word of contradictory caudillos.
