Enrique Peña Nieto, president elect of Mexico
The background
With votes still being counted, PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is in the lead by six percentage points after Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico – returning power to the authoritarian party Mexicans voted out of office 12 years ago.
Peña Nieto has taken to television to claim his victory and Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon, has welcomed Peña Nieto as his successor, but the presumptive winner’s biggest rival, leftist party leader and former Mexico DF mayor Lopez Obrador has refused to concede the election. It’s the second time Obrador has refused to concede an election – six years ago, he lost the 2006 presidential election to Calderon by 1 percentage point; he refusal to give up the election set off a series of protests that locked down Mexico’s capital city for months.
Peña Nieto’s victory is being seen as a vote for the old guard, as well as a rejection of the current administration’s pursuit of the increasingly violent war on drug cartels. The peso rallied on the news of his win and on the strength of his promise to boost economic growth and private investment, to rank fourth most amongst world powers.
Who is Enrique Peña Nieto?
Institutional Revolution Party candidate Peña Nieto, 45, has been in the political game since 1990, and was governor of the State of Mexico, the country’s most populous state, from 2005 to 2011. He is touted as a realist, a pragmatic leader who can get things done, but his detractors see him as the telegenic face of an old authoritative regime, poised to bring back dictatorship. According to a Wikileaked diplomatic cable, Peña Nieto “is not known for transparency when it comes to his friends and allies” and is cut from the same cloth as his party. Nevertheless, as el gober (“the guv”), he invested heavily both in public works and cleansing his party’s profile of the taint of authoritarianism. In his personal life, when Peña Nieto’s first wife died in 2007, he became one of Mexico’s most eligible bachelors – until he married a glamourous Televisa soap opera star. The President-elect is “a charming and extremely good-looking nonentity”, who speaks no foreign languages and has barely traveled outside of Mexico, wrote Gwynne Dyer at The Salt Lake Tribune. When asked what three books influenced him the most, “he struggled to name any books at all. Finally, he came up with two: the Bible, and a Jeffrey Archer potboiler.”
A return to the old guard
PRI dominated Mexico’s political scene for 71 years, but in recent years has attempted to rehabilitate its dictatorial image and portray itself as a modern party. Whether that was the deciding factor in the vote or it was the sluggish Mexican economy, combined with the on-going and increasingly bloody military war on drug cartels, media outlets around the world are seeing this as a return to the old guard.
“Mexico will have now its own Vladimir Putin,” wrote Luis Hernandez Navarro.
Sheep voted for Pena Nieto
“Two Mexicos confronted each other at the polls on Sunday,” wrote Luis Hernandez Navarro at The Guardian’s Comment is Free. “One of them, formed by thoughtful citizens who want a different country and are determined to support Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The other, those who are afraid of change, obedient to political hierarchies and passively consume the television narrative, who voted for Enrique Peña Nieto.” Navarro alleged that Peña Nieto used his relationship with Televisa to promote his image, while his party bought the votes of the poor with food and money. Those who voted, voted for the past: “The old authoritarian regime was restored. Mexico will have now its own Vladimir Putin.”
What Peña Nieto plans to do about the war
More than 50,000 people have lost their lives since 2006 in the Mexican government’s desperately bloody war on drug cartels. Peña Nieto’s campaign de-emphasised going after drug kingpins and cartels, but, as Will Grant, BBC Latin America analyst, noted, “The new administration will have to decide early on whether to continue the current military strategy against the drug cartels or try an as yet undefined new approach.” Negotiating with the gangs is not a likely option – and Peña Nieto has ruled out any sort of pact – but the Mexican people are disillusioned by the military approach.
People want a deal with the cartels
So Peña Nieto wasn’t elected because of his political intelligence, but rather because the current government’s war on drug cartels “blinds” Mexicans to anything else, wrote Gwynne Dyer at The Salt Lake Tribune. When PRI was in power, the cartels paid off government officials: “It was a grubby arrangement, but not many people got killed and the public slept easily.” Now, the public wants those deals again to restore the peace. “And would this be such a terrible thing for Mexico? Well, so long as the United States will not permit the legalization and nationalization of the drug trade, it’s probably Mexico’s best remaining alternative.”
More on the war on drugs in Mexico
- Enrique Acevedo: The real failures of Mexico’s war on drugs
- Mexico’s war on drugs is a deadly failure
- Mexican drug war continues as another mass grave found
- Mexican primary school teacher leads children in song through gun battle
