Mismatch

When referring to the “astuteness of the creoles”, Jorge Luis Borges criticized the “spirit of cheated legality or comfortable illegality” that characterizes our culture. Being “astute” said the Argentine writer, did not imply ceasing to be ignorant. This observation came to mind when reading and listening to comments and opinions that politicians and intellectuals have put forth regarding the problems the country faces in terms of governance and capacity to deal with the crisis and promote economic growth. What is remarkable about the public arena today is the urgent need to solve the wrong problem.
The universal diagnosis in the political arena seems to be the inability to put together legislative majorities that will favor the country’s governance. Following this logic, the country has been adrift since 1997 when the PRI lost its legislative majority, because the president’s party no longer has a reliable majority in Congress. The inexorable conclusion of this analysis turns out to be obvious: the only way to solve the country’s problems is to create mechanisms that will guarantee the existence of legislative majorities. Sounds nice and logical, but judging by the evidence, that’s not what people want, plus it does not solve the root of the problem: even with majorities, earlier governments were not working either.
The proposed solutions to the problems identified can be roughly summarized in three major categories: a) redefine the party system to reduce their number, ideally to two (changing the system or adopting a runoff election); b) abandon the presidential system in favor of a parliamentarian one that, by definition, grants control to the party that achieves a governing coalition; and c) build a somewhat artificial mechanism, like the French head of cabinet or prime minister, who can achieve control of the legislature and become a alternate and parallel source of power vis-à-vis  the presidency.
The three conceptual solutions have merit and respond to the shown inability to rule the country. The problem is that these are vehicles that seek, as in 1929 when the PNR, predecessor of the PRI was created, to solve the problem of politicians and power, not of the issues that matter to the population and of the legitimacy of the decision making processes.
Today there are two evident facts. One is that we face an obvious problem of governance. The three branches of government, particularly the Congress and the Executive waste more time trying to understand each other (unsuccessfully) than trying to decide the relevant issues and act accordingly. This paralysis has given rise to proposals, explicit or implicit, that what is required is that skilful politicians get the means to impose decisions, institutionally or through other means, so that the country can return to the path of economic growth. In other words, what is required is to return to an era similar to the PRI in which the president could impose his will. This time it could be the president or whoever holds the legislative leadership, but the principle is the same and the hypothesis is obvious: Mexicans are incapable of governing themselves and what we need is a strong leader who decides and imposes his views. Several of the aspiring candidates to exercise power support this stance: the same holds for those who proclaim the urgent need for the president to exercise extra constitutional powers, as for those who propose the creation of new structures that will achieve the same result, but this time from the legislature.
The other incontrovertible fact is that the population has consistently voted against the formation of a legislative majority from the party in the presidency. There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon, but the fact is indisputable. Since the electoral reforms of the 90’s, which came into fruition with PRI’s loss of its perennial control of the legislature in 1997, the president’s party has not achieved a legislative majority. A structural explanation is that the combination of a presidential with a multiparty system results in a permanent mismatch because it makes it highly unlikely for any party to achieve a majority. Other explanations are less technical but equally relevant: particularly in regard to midterm elections, the race is territorial in nature and that offers huge advantages to parties with strong historical roots at the local, state or regional level, and not to the person holding the presidency.
Whatever the correct explanation is, what is clear is that people prefer that the president not have a legislative majority at his disposal. The question is why. And, regardless of what politicians argue, it is clear that the people do not want a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary regime even is this were much more efficient. From the perspective of common citizens, the greatest risk is precisely that a “strong man” (either the president or a legislative leader) tries to impose his will because then all the hard won checks and balances would disappear. This rejection of the inherent risks involved in excessive power in the hands of one person is what defeated Lopez Obrador in 2006 and, in general, why the PRI lost in 2000. The population clearly prefers the status quo, even if this translates into an economic performance well below desirable levels or below the country’s real economic potential, than the risk of one crisis after another.
The country’s real political problem is not the absence of majorities or of decision making and governing capacity but the absence of institutional mechanisms to govern without excesses. That is, the country has to solve two problems simultaneously: one is to create the structure that organizes power so that it becomes possible to make decisions, and the other is that these decisions do not harm the population. In a country with weak institutions such as ours, this combination of factors is very difficult to achieve and maybe this helps explain better than anything the current stagnation in which we live: as long as there is no reasonable certainty that the president is prevented from committing abuses, the people will always prefer paralysis because the alternative-chaos- is too costly as could be seen, over and over, in the crises of the seventies through the nineties. Mexicans do not want an all-powerful leader, what they want is a government that works for their benefit.
The philosopher Karl Popper argued that the real dilemma was to build a system to control or get rid of bad rulers without resorting to violence. In Mexico it seems that we have been able to prevent these rulers from reaching power, but we have been unable to create a functioning government. The real problem is not one of parliamentary majorities, but of checks and balances designed to avoid excesses, not to paralyze the country.