Marv wrote:
Julio, what likelihood is there that the tribunal might actually order a rerun of the election in order to confer a legitimacy on Calderon and the electoral process which neither currently has, and, of course, in order to avoid the dangerous situation of dual power which you forecast? I understand the possibility of a full rerun has not been entirely dismissed in Mexico.
Very knowledgeable people in Mexico whom I respect seem to think that, in the last few years, the judiciary has gained a modicum of independence and that its rulings are becoming more technically motivated, in the legal sense of the term. One thinker along this line is Miguel Angel Granados Chapa, one of the best living journalists in the world (move over Seymour Hersh!). Granadas Chapa, who supports López Obrador (although critical of the decision to camp on Reforma), has publicly criticized his legal team as amateurish in the way they brought the case to the electoral tribunal. He thinks the movement should have taken the legal front much more seriously. And he also thinks the movement jumped too early to political pressure against the judiciary. I'm not impressed by his argument and I'm not impressed with the evidence of independence in previous rulings.
From a distance, you can always Monday-quarterback the movement. But
imagine the constraints in which López Obrador's legal team had to operate to (1) get as many of the 130K+ tally sheets (a logistical nightmare) and review them in a few weeks (overwhelmed as they were by so many other tasks, including those related to the political organization of the movement), (2) pick out those with irregularities (over 65% of them with well-documented arithmetic discrepancies were posted on www.amlo.org.mx), (3) choose among them the worst horror stories and build *casuistic* legal cases on them as required by the law (a bit over 20%, if I remember correctly, were casuistically challenged by the Coalición's legal team), and then (4) prepare for the hearings. No, I don't blame López Obrador's legal team. First, I'm sure there are not that many constitutional and electoral law scholars in the team. It's amazing how talent and expertise are absent when you most need them. And, second, I think they did more than seemed possible. Third, no, I don't think the tribunal deserves the benefit of the doubt. And, fourth, yes, I do think that, without early political pressure, the mood could have easily led to passivity. So, in conclusion, I think the choice made by the leaders of the movement to have the people mobilize and turn up the fire on the magistrates' feet was correct. So, as you can see, I don't think that the tribunal's rulings are as above politics as Granadas Chapa seems to think. And by the same token, if nobody -- no active political force -- is demanding to annull the election, then the subjective probability I'd assign to such outcome is smallish. I think there is already some public evidence that the tribunal is split along the López Obrador-Calderón divide. So, IMO, it's exactly the way López Obrador is framing it: It's either an opportunity for the magistrates to do justice and enforce the constitution (ensure transparency and certainty in the election outcome, i.e. recount all the ballots) or to end up in the trashbin of history by enabling the imposition of a spurious president.
But this would be quite an unexpected and radical step for the tribunal since it would be widely seen as rewarding mass civil resistance - a bourgeois no-no, especially in a fragile parliamentary democracy.
It'd be radical if the tribunal ruled in favor of recounting all the ballots, on the basis of the evidence found in that 9% already recounted. Because, really, full recount is not an excessive demand, regardless of the legal flaws in López Obrador's case. As I've written in the blog, the tribunal's formal role is not to defend the IFE or Calderón. It is to defend the interest of the people. So, even if López Obrador's legal case was weak, the demand for full recount is not excessive and the tribunal had (has) the constitutional powers to make up for the weakness in López Obrador's case and ensure the transparency and certainty of the election outcome on its own initiative. So, voiding the election and having a re-run would not be seen as a radical measure or a concession by the movement -- I don't think. It'd be seen as what it'd be -- a maneuver to confuse and split the movement. But, however tentative and nervous the right seems (and, they do seem nervous), they have some measure of unity around the goal of imposing Calderón. They don't want a void election. The strategy of the right, if I read it correctly, does rely on the people getting tired. But the core of their strategy, IMO, is to try and repeat Carlos Salinas' stunt after the 1988 election. As you may remember, Salinas lost the election to Cárdenas, but imposed himself via fraud. Cárdenas didn't put up a fight. Carlos Salinas was perceived as an illegitimate president by most Mexicans until a week or so after his inauguration. Barely a week had passed and this guy had already surprised everybody with a series of spectacular moves that showed him as a decisive m*****-f*****. One of them was to send the military to the northern Golf coast to snatch and throw in jail a corrupt union leader who supported Cárdenas, but had a terrible public reputation. That action united the PRI around Salinas like nothing else. You hit the saddle to let the donkey know. Very soon, Salinas launched a well-prepared campaign to get Mexico's public debt a substantial break with the international banks. Without a public fuss, he made a very credible threat of default that made the banks cave in. At the time, this was totally unprecedented. Like 20% of Mexico's debt was slashed. The economy revived. On the social front, Salinas put together a social program called "Solidaridad" that did a lot to defuse the social wave that Cárdenas rode in 1988. Salinas left power as an incredibly popular president, even though the Zapatista uprising and the killing of Colosio and Ruíz Massieu in 1994 did begin to dim his aura. Then the peso plunge of late 1994-early 1995 reversed the rest of of his popularity. Zedillo blamed it all on Salinas. The people, perhaps retrieving and adding as an extra factor the memory of the 1988 massive fraud against Cárdenas, believed Zedillo and turned against Salinas. He hasn't since been able to rebuild his reputation -- and not for lacking of trying. In the current case, the social front -- key in Salinas' strategy -- is not very likely to work for Calderón. He is making noises. So he probably thinks he can show some token results on the poverty front to co-opt some of the poor who supported López Obrador. He's probably going to try to reinforce the Sedesol (Josefina Vazquez Mota, former Sedesol minister, was her campaign manager), which is the bureaucratic apparatus that resulted from Salinas' "Solidaridad." But I don't think Calderón's success is likely. Why? First, people learn and discount. Token results won't do this time around. Second, as much as Salinas tried to use "Solidaridad" as a way to weaken the old PRI corporatist structures (the old unions, peasant organizations, etc. didn't like his economic restructuring), he drew from that well of institutional knowledge the PRI had built from the time when the Carranza-Obregón-Calles wing of the revolution coopted the social program of the revolution. Not for nothing the PRI clinged to power longer than the CPSU. If the experience of the Sedesol under Fox is any guide, the PAN is totally tone deaf in approaching the needs of the poor. For the PAN, dealing effectively and respectfully with the working poor -- without patronizing them or moralizing about their situation -- is as contra natura as a Republican administration helping effectively Katrina's victims in New Orleans. So, I don't think they have much of chance. If on top of that, the movement makes the right moves (assuming Calderón becomes president, which it's not yet to be taken for granted), then Calderón is going to be even more constrained. Julio
