The Mexican blues
Intellectuals find fundamental flaws in the country’s democracy
ON JUNE 5th voters in 12 Mexican states unexpectedly gave the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of President Enrique Peña Nieto a good kicking. In elections for governors, by a preliminary count, the PRI lost seven states to the conservative National Action Party (PAN). In four of those states, the PRI had never before lost power. “After 86 years in which they governed Veracruz, we beat the PRI,” exclaimed Miguel Ángel Yunes, the PAN candidate in that state. This is how democracy is supposed to work: angry voters get to kick the bums out.
For Mexico, this is still a novelty. It was only in 2000 that seven decades of one-party rule by the PRI finally ended when Vicente Fox of the PAN won the presidency. Yet hopes of a deep and lasting transformation that Mr Fox’s victory raised have given way to disillusion. In striking unison, several of the country’s leading thinkers published jeremiads on the state of Mexican democracy last month.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The Mexican blues"
From the June 11th 2016 edition
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