Three months from now, when Mexico's president-elect Felipe Calderon takes office, many will consider it a dubious honor. This is perhaps the only certainty in Mexico's politics right now.
But the country's oil prices are higher than ever and its country-risk premiums are lower than ever. It's remittances from abroad, tourism revenues and foreign investment are hitting all time highs, and annual GDP growth estimated at 4.2 percent for this year.
Mexicans -- in many ways -- have never had it so good.
Indeed, after 10 years of uninterrupted macroeconomic stability -- something Mexico has not experienced since the 1960s -- the middle class has expanded dramatically and reasonably priced bank credit is now available to millions who had been excluded in the past.
Yet, despite these robust changes, poverty remains widespread, inequality abysmal and social resentment is on the rise.
This is why Calderon's opponent in July's presidential election, the populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, obtained such a large percentage of the vote compared to the Mexican left's previous high-water mark in the election of 2000. But it was not enough to win an election that Lopez Obrador and his backers thought was in the bag.
The extremely tight race -- Calderon won by 0.5 percent of the vote -- and the profound disappointment suffered by Lopez Obrador and his supporters led them to contest the ruling of Mexico's electoral authorities and to refuse to acknowledge Calderon's victory.
Instead, Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, and his supporters demanded a vote-by-vote recount, which is not mandated -- though it is not proscribed -- by the country's electoral laws. The Electoral Court, however, decided otherwise. This is where Mexico stands today: a mess by any definition, with no obvious solution in sight.
In the long run, the answer undoubtedly lies in the transformation of the Mexican left and partly also of the Mexican right. For years, both were subsumed within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seven decades.
That epoch came to an end in 2000, and will not return. Today, right and left, as well as the PRI itself, are all separate entities, and have a great deal of reconstruction to do.
The right-of-center Party of National Action (PAN), to which current President Vicente Fox and Calderon belong, needs to acquire a sincere and profound social conscience. It must transform itself into something like the Social Christian or Christian Democratic parties that exist in Costa Rica, Chile, Venezuela and Peru. Otherwise, it will continue to be seen by Mexico's impoverished masses as the party of the rich -- perhaps unfairly, but not entirely unjustly. PAN's metamorphosis is underway, but there is still much work to be done.
Much more importantly, however -- and perhaps to the surprise of many benevolent international observers -- the Mexican left is nowhere near transforming itself into a modern, reformist, social-democratic party.
Not only is it not New Labor; it is not even like the French, Spanish or Chilean Socialist Parties or Brazil's Workers' Party. It continues to be a movement with a revolutionary faction -- not a majority, but certainly a large minority -- bent on insurrection, socialism and "anti-imperialist" alignment with Cuba and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Mexico's left refuses truly to embrace market economics, representative democracy and the rule of law. Obviously, many of its members and leaders do subscribe to these tenets and disapprove in private of Lopez Obrador's rabble-rousing antics. But as long they remain relatively powerless, Mexico will remain unbalanced, deprived of the modern left that it needs to combat poverty and inequality and hostage to those who still believe in revolution and the assault on the Winter Palace.
Without these twin transformations of its right and left, Mexico can only keep running in place while so many others speed forward. But change will not happen overnight, so Mexico needs short-term solutions to its travails.
The most urgent, feasible and relevant steps involve electoral and legal reforms aimed at avoiding a repeat of the current protests over the presidential vote. These include establishing a second-round run-off for presidential elections so that Mexico's next president has the support of more than 50 percent of the voters. But they also entail the reelection of representatives and senators, recourse to referendums for constitutional amendments and independent candidacies.
Perhaps most importantly, Mexico must devise a French-style semi-presidential system whereby a designated prime minister, ratified by Congress, is responsible for building majorities there.
Eliminating the purchase of air time on radio and television during campaigns, with the consequent reduction in their cost, would complement these changes.
None of these indispensable and long-postponed reforms will convince Lopez Obrador's followers that the end of poverty and inequality in Mexico is around the corner. But no significant improvement on these fronts can occur without thoroughly refashioning the country's decision-making process.
Fox and his team thought that the mechanisms that worked during the authoritarian period could simply be transferred to the democratic era and function smoothly. In fact, none of the major economic and social reforms Mexico desperately needs in order to grow more rapidly, distribute wealth more evenly and combat poverty more effectively can be passed if the institutional scaffolding is not rebuilt.
It is time for Mexico to turn the page, but it must turn the right page.
Jorge Castaneda was Mexico's foreign minister from 2000 to 2003 and is a professor of politics and Latin American studies at New York University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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