Countdown to 2018 Presidential Election Finds Mexico at the Crossroads Gema Santamaria, Alejandro Velez, and Francesc Badia - openDemocracy
go to original February 28, 2017

President Peña Nieto's approval ratings have fallen following the recent oil-hike crisis (NBC News)

Mexico is facing a deep legitimacy crisis. Presidential elections will be held next year in a context where the urgency of facing necessary changes must be an absolute priority.

Presidential elections will be held in Mexico in 2018, in a scenario of great complexity, uncertainty and instability. Donald Trump's unforeseen victory has triggered all the alarms. His blatant aggressiveness against Mexico, in relation to both NAFTA and migration, is endangering a bilateral, asymmetrical interdependence relationship between the two economies: its disruption could result in a potentially unbearable increase in tension, both internally and in bilateral relations.

The fact that President Peña Nieto's approval ratings have fallen to 12% following the recent oil-hike crisis, and the unending citizens’ mobilizations and protests, shows how open the political evolution of the country is.

Mexico is a country of deep contrasts and contradictions – which comes to explain why it is said to be a country where magical realism is in fact customary. Just a few recent examples to illustrate this point: Peña Nieto’s government fiercely defended its educational reform, including repressing demonstrators and civil society, while a journalistic research team came up with the discovery that the president who said that he wanted to evaluate all the teachers in the country had plagiarized his own undergraduate thesis.

Another surreal event happened when dozens of marches were called throughout the country to protest against the presidential initiative to legalize equal marriage and adoption by homosexual couples, and to recognize gender identity, while the whole country was mourning - crying and singing - the death of Juan Gabriel, a popular musician and composer who, when asked if he was gay, answered "you shouldn’t ask what you can see for yourself".

Also, on September, 15, Independence Day in Mexico, there coexisted in the streets of the capital city a large demonstration demanding the resignation of the president who had invited hated Donald Trump, and groups of people who had been taken to the Zócalo, in the traditional clientelist fashion, to cheer the president and his family standing on the presidential balcony.

Finally, Mexico presents itself at international forums as a leading country in the promotion of human and migrants’ rights, while silence, neglect and lack of justice mark the country’s recent history of extrajudicial killings, forced displacements, disappearances, and abandoned and forgotten migrants – both in transit and returnees.

Faced with the upsurge of violence in different states of the republic and the undeniable failure of a decade of "war" against drugs, Peña Nieto’s government has taken the option of rewarding inertia and lack of response rather than developing a strategic and integral vision of the security crisis facing the country.

...Mexico, like the Roman god Janus, has two faces: one looks to a future of greater transparency and citizen participation; the other looks to an antidemocratic and repressive past.

Read the rest at openDemocracy | Español

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