MexicoPolitics: Calderón faces a challenging year ahead
Just over a year ago, the most popular talking point among the chattering classes in Mexico was not how well Felipe Calderón, the country’s recently-elected president, would do in office but how long he would last.
The left, presided over by the swarthy and charismatic Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was insisting that Mr Calderón’s electoral victory in July had been the result of fraud.
In one huge march on the Zócalo, the capital’s main square, Mr López Obrador proclaimed himself Mexico’s “legitimate president” before hundreds of thousands of supporters. He promised to make life impossible for his adversary.
Today, most of those threats have dissipated.
Mr López Obrador has all but disappeared from the political scene, Mr Calderón’s popularity ratings are at a more-than-respectable 60 per cent and his administration has pushed through three significant reforms in less than 12 months – considerably more than the previous government in six years.
“Calderón has risen far above expectations,” admits Rogelio Ramirez de la O, an economist and a favourite for the post of finance minister had Mr López Obrador emerged victorious.
Much of the success is the result of Mr Calderón’s decision, barely a week into his presidency, to declare war on organised crime.
In recent years, partly as a result of the US crackdown on supply routes through the Caribbean, Mexico has become an important transit country for cocaine and other narcotics.
But the drugs trade has also brought rising levels of violence as the various cartels fight for control of the business. As Mr Calderón said recently: “The biggest threat to the country’s future is insecurity and organised crime.”
Against that backdrop, his decision to send thousands of police and members of the armed forces to win back territory controlled by the cartels went down well with a population feeling vulnerable and under attack.
The other element that helped Mr Calderón to consolidate power during his first year is the left’s inability to capitalise and build on the strong electoral showing of last year.
While Mr López Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) is now the second-biggest force in Congress, it has been almost entirely excluded by Mr Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN) and the Insitutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the third-biggest congressional force.
As for Mr López Obrador, an exhaustive tour of the country’s municipalities has barely received any media coverage.
The tour served only to isolate the former candidate from mainstream politics, making Mr López Obrador “an exile in the wilderness”, says Alejandro Hope, a political analyst at GEA, a consultancy in Mexico City.
Indeed, some political analysts believe Mr Calderón’s successes have been so great during his first 12 months in office that even his defeats have turned into victories.
In elections for governor in the southern state of Tabasco, victory for the PRI over the PAN provided sufficient goodwill among the party’s rank and file to support Mr Calderón’s tax reform in Congress.
“Without that victory it is doubtful whether the fiscal reform would have survived as it did,” says Jorge Zepeda, a political analyst in Mexico City.
In spite of Mr Calderón’s unexpected success, Mr Hope and others believe the coming 12 months may be a different story.
One reason, argues Mr Hope, is simply political wear and tear. The difficulty of producing clear results in the war against drugs combined with the difficulties of sustaining high popularity levels in office have already begun to show in the polls.
According to GEA, Mr Calderón’s popularity has declined from 69 per cent in June to 60 per cent today. “These are still good numbers but the downward trend is clear,” says Mr Hope.
Dan Lund, a political analyst in Mexico City, goes further.
He argues that apart from the war against drugs, Mr Calderón has no defined political agenda beyond trying to increase his party’s share of power in the 2009 mid-term congressional elections.
Meanwhile, economic growth has been disappointing and the impediments to boosting that growth, such as Mexico’s powerful business monopolies, have remained in place.
“Calderón has not taken any difficult decisions on transforming Mexico,” says Mr Lund.
The second reason the next 12 months could prove more difficult is that Mr Calderón will almost certainly have to take on the delicate issue of energy reform over which there is much less political consensus than on the reforms passed this year.
Oil revenue has risen in importance in recent years and now represents almost 40 per cent of total government income.
Yet production is falling because of lack of exploration investment at Pemex, the state oil monopoly, and because of the constitutional prohibition on joint-association contracts with private companies.
It is no secret that Mr Calderón would like to give Pemex greater flexibility to involve private companies in the risk-sharing process but he needs the support of the PRI to do so.
But the PRI has strung together a series of election victories this year that have increased its confidence in raising demands in return for co-operation on structural reform.
The overall result will almost certainly be a difficult year ahead for Mr Calderón and his team.
As Mr Hope puts it: “The honeymoon is definitely over.”
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