Mexico’s Quiet Election

[Geee]

National Review:

What if they held an election and nobody came? That’s more or less what happened last Sunday in Mexico, at least as far as most American journalists (including me) are concerned.

That’s a vivid contrast with the last three presidential elections in Mexico, which had enormous consequences for that country and for the United States. I happened to be in Mexico on vacation in the spring of 1994, when Luis Donaldo Colosio, the candidate of the ruling PRI party, was assassinated. I listened to the radio broadcast as Ernesto Zedillo, speaking shakily, accepted the party’s nomination to succeed him. As with every PRI candidate since 1929, he won the election.

In 2000, I was in Mexico to cover the election in which Vicente Fox, candidate of the center-right PAN party, was elected — the first opposition victory in 71 years. I was there as the PAN crowd was celebrating at the Angel of Independence statue on the Paseo de la Reforma. As they jumped up and down in rhythm to a classic Mexican song, I felt the earth move — it turns out that the boulevard is built on spongy fill land that vibrates under stress.

And in 2006, I was in Mexico City as PAN candidate Felipe Calderón beat the left-wing mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, by 1 percentage point. AMLO’s followers protested the result for months, occupying the Reforma Boulevard and separating the capital in two. These elections effectively ended the one-party rule of the PRI, whose very name — the party of the institutional revolution — suggested its peculiar nature.

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The PRI was established in 1929, after two decades of revolutionary violence. Each Mexican president would serve for a single six-year term, and in the last year would pick his successor — put his finger, or dedazo, on him — who would be nominated by the PRI. After a campaign of elaborate ceremony around the country, he would be routinely elected. Bad things would tend to happen in each president’s sixth year, or sexenio, and after he left office he would be reviled and in many cases would leave the country altogether.