Jaime "El Bronco" Rodriguez just became Mexico's first-ever independent governor
Mexico's 2015 elections, held last Sunday, turned out to be a lot more interesting than your average midterms. Like the U.S., Mexico has a president and a bicameral legislature. The president and the members of the upper chamber (the Senate, there as here) serve concurrent six-year terms, while representatives in the lower house (known as the Chamber of Deputies) serve three-year terms.
But in a huge departure from the way we do things here, Mexico's constitution forbids legislators from serving consecutive terms, so both chambers turn over completely whenever they're up for election. Unsurprisingly, this causes legislative mayhem and increases the power of party leaders, but "no re-election" was one of the central tenets of the Mexican Revolution and holds an important place in the collective political conscience (though the rules are about to change). So, last week's midterms elected all 500 members of the lower house of congress as well as seventeen state-level legislatures, nine governors, and more than 300 mayors.
Political parties are powerful institutions in Mexico. The current president of Mexico, Peña Nieto, is a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI ruled the country from 1929 through 2000 (called "the perfect dictatorship"). An opposition party candidate defeated the PRI for the first time ever in 2000 and then again in 2006. When he was first elected in 2012, Nieto's pro-business, pro-reform rhetoric and movie-star good looks earned him positive press internationally.
However, his victory represented the return of the PRI to executive power and had a lot of people in Mexico calling foul. Since his election, Nieto's popularity within his country has dropped. Last fall, Mexico was rocked by a scandal involving the disappearance of 43 students at the hands of drug traffickers linked to the state government. Additionally, Nieto passed an ambitious energy reform plan that opened the national oil company, Pemex, to public investment for the first time since 1938. Though reform was needed, the legislation passed with scant support from the left and represents a major setback to progressive causes.
Now that the votes are in, the main takeaway from the Mexican midterm elections is that voters are sick of entrenched political parties. This should come as no surprise. While turnout was moderate (47 percent, compared with 44 percent in the last midterm), an estimated 5 percent of all ballots were turned in blank or deliberately defaced in protest.
Though the PRI remains in power following the midterms, the Mexican political landscape is more fragmented than ever. The PRI did manage to maintain its voting majority in the lower house, and Nieto will likely be able to move forward with his legislative plans in the second half of his administration. But the results were far from a ringing endorsement of the ruling party. The PRI saw its national share of the vote decline from 32 percent to 29 percent, despite an alliance with the Green Party, leading to a loss of seats.
The results were also as much about the failures of country's two main opposition parties—the National Action Party (PAN) on the right and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) on the left—as they were about the (un)popularity of the PRI. The PAN controlled the country from 2000 to 2012, a period during which organized crime violence exploded; meanwhile, the politicians linked to the disappearance of the 43 students are PRD members. Furthermore, the political left split in half in 2012 when the PRD's leader left the party to form a second left-of-center opposition party, the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA).
Disenchantment with the existing political system was also reflected in the election of the country's first-ever independent governor, Jaime Rodriguez Calderon—known as "El Bronco"—in the state of Nuevo Leon. (It wasn't even legal to run as an independent in Mexico until last year.) Nuevo Leon, just south of Texas, is home to Monterrey, which anchors the country's third-largest metropolitan area, and it's one of the most economically important states in the country. El Bronco is a very popular, tough-talking, cowboy politician who won on an anti-corruption, anti-establishment platform.
I happened to be visiting Mexico last Sunday. Speaking with my friends from different parts of the country, very few told me they planned to vote. Granted, this doesn't reflect a fair sample of the Mexican electorate: It would be like judging U.S. politics based in conversations with a dozen New Yorkers all in their twenties.
However, I do believe that confidence in the existing system is low. Mexico has become more democratic over the last few decades, as reflected in the ousting of the PRI in 2000 and a package of political reforms passed last year. However, there is still a long way to go. El Bronco has demonstrated that running against the status quo can get you far. It will be interesting to see how independent politicians and the smaller opposition parties develop their national reputations over the next three years.