Uncovering Mexico
Jeremy Schwartz is the Mexico correspondent for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Mexico City.What's on this page?
The entry titled "No speech? No problem, but the end of a tradition.."
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No speech? No problem, but the end of a tradition.
So much fuss for so little action. In what goes down as one of the more anticlimactic moments in recent Mexican politics, President Felipe Calderon handed over his first State of the Nation address to a well-behaved Congress this evening.
A week of intense dealmaking had ended with this: Calderon did not give the address as a speech, as presidents have done for decades; instead he merely handed over the written report and will give his speech Sunday morning in the friendlier confines of the National Palace.
In exchange, legislators with the opposition Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) didn’t disrupt his appearance at the Congress. Last year, PRD lawmakers physically prevented then-President Vicente Fox from taking the stage to give the final State of the Nation speech of his term, a humiliation for the outgoing leader. This year, the lawmakers left the congressional hall as a group before Calderon entered.
The negotiation between Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD likely goes much deeper.
Top PAN officials said this week that the future of electoral reform, perhaps the PRD’s top legislative issue, could be in jeopardy if PRD lawmakers made trouble. The PRD is looking for serious overhauls in the nation’s electoral system in the wake of last summer’s contested presidential election. Many PRD officials believe the presidency was stolen from PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador through fraud.
But the agreement on the State of the Nation address may signal something else: Mexico may not be as ungovernable as the pundits predicted. A large, and perhaps growing movement within the PRD is pushing for more engagement with Calderon’s government to take advantage of the party’s status as the second largest in Congress. This so-called New Left has butted heads with Lopez Obrador, who wants a policy of strict rejection of whatever the “illegitimate” president proposes.
In any event, today’s events probably marked the end of the State of the Nation tradition, once an indispensable part of the Mexican presidency. One former president used to give marathon speeches, beginning in the morning and ending at night. Some predict the address will be written out of the law altogether; others say the future is more handovers of reports.
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