Another Stripe on the Tiger

 Another Stripe on the Tiger

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero

Mexico is at a breaking point institutionally. The most recent report from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, one of the most respected global authorities in measuring political systems, has reclassified our country. Mexico is no longer considered a democracy, but an electoral autocracy. This diagnosis coincides with the warnings that political scientist José Antonio Aguilar Rivera has issued regarding the erosion of Mexican liberalism. The decline is not an isolated event, but a seven-year process.

According to the assessment, the deterioration began after the 2018 elections and has accelerated under the current administration. The data is conclusive: Mexico now ranks below nations like India, Peru, and Senegal in its democratic standards. The world, in general, has regressed to levels of freedom comparable to 1978, but the Mexican case stands out for the speed of its transformation.

An electoral autocracy is a regime where elections are still held, but the playing field is so skewed that competition is artificial. Recent reforms are blamed for this regression. The reform of the judiciary to elect judges by popular vote is seen by experts as the capture of the last independent check on power.

By politicizing the courts, the balance of power disappears.The report details that freedom of expression is the first domino to fall.

Harassment of the press and attempts at censorship place the government among the top global offenders of the last decade. Differences and conflicts with civil society are also included in this category of curtailment of freedoms. The absolute control that Morena exercises over the executive and legislative branches has allowed it to dismantle the institutional framework that took decades to build.

In the words of experts like Aguilar Rivera, we are not returning to the hegemonic party system of the last century, but rather facing a new model that uses the legitimacy of the ballot box to suppress pluralism.V-Dem's warning is clear: when a democracy begins to autocratize, it is far more likely to collapse completely than to survive.

The Importance of an Effective Electoral System

 The Importance of an Effective Electoral System

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero

The Mexican political system, like Latin American presidential systems in general, has reached a critical point in the debate surrounding its electoral and governance structure.

Experience reveals that outside the United States, presidentialism does not function effectively and has faced severe problems stemming from the separation of powers, high electoral competitiveness, and political fragmentation.

In Mexico, the electoral system has been subject to numerous reforms that, far from resolving these problems, seem to cyclically fall into the same errors, perpetuating a quagmire that hinders democratic governance and favors the intervention of de facto powers and external actors, such as the United States.

Giovanni Sartori, in his work on constitutional engineering, proposed the concept of intermittent presidentialism.

This idea should not be understood as a derogatory critique, but rather as a strategy to make presidentialism functional in contexts where governance has been severely compromised.

Adopting measures such as implementing runoff elections for all offices, eliminating corrupt practices in party financing, and reducing the influence of powerful vested interests are concrete steps toward strengthening a presidential system that, in its intermittent form, can offer greater stability and democratic control.

Accumulating evidence indicates that electoral reforms in Mexico have been insufficient, and that social distrust and the ambition of political parties only deepen the crisis.

One option, perhaps radical but plausible, would be to adopt elements of the U.S. electoral system to mitigate the erosion of presidential power.

The political history of Latin America demands robust democratic governance, and reforms must go beyond mere stopgap measures, promoting a Sartorian model that makes presidential power functional, inhibits the influence of external and vested interests, and guarantees the effective exercise of political power.

Continuing in the same logic of collisions only demonstrates that Mexican political science has failed to translate its knowledge into practical solutions, and that, ultimately, the country remains trapped in an electoral organization model that, despite its formal changes, maintains the structure of a system that fails to respond to the challenges of modern governance.

Democratic political culture and the INE

 Democratic political culture and the INE

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero

As in every election, the ways and means in which political actors conduct themselves to monopolize public representation positions are surprising. Processes of usurpation of indigenous and gender identity now abound so that chiefs and oligarchies maintain their power at the expense of the public treasury. Exhibiting the phenomenon is of little use.

Other political and legal analyzes affirm the need for greater bureaucracy to micro-spatially monitor the process. The application of the law is, however, not a valid option in contemporary Mexico.

To obey the law it is necessary to educate in reason and, in weak states like Mexico, due to procedural economy, certain actions that would have a high significant value are abandoned.

Common sense indicates that the INE never had the strength to impose laws and corresponding sanctions. However, the large fines that were imposed on certain occasions and that, however, also ended in waste, also remain for history.

The INE never wanted to promote the effort to apply the draconian system represented by the electoral rules. Not even the national budget would have served to sanction the patrimonialist political leadership. The IFE/INE was complicit in an authoritarian regression that was slowly built. In the end, the imbalance between ideals and means led to succumbing to a form of democratic transition that turned out to be onerous and unproductive. Mexican politics abounds in surrealism and with it an authoritarian populism that has always been a hindrance and atavism is hidden.

Democratic civic culture was an obligation in the development of the IFE/INE, it was never fulfilled. The Electoral Councils sought to be protagonists of the narrative of power and forgot about democratic civility, neutrality and ethics. As referees, they were always biased and subject to political cliques.

Politicians do everything to achieve power and stay there. The electoral process that corresponds to the current six-year term violated all regulations; Strictly speaking, no one should be a candidate and, therefore, all the local horror stories regarding the registration of candidates are peccata minuta.

The reconversion of Morena into the tortilla row pointed out by Weldon and Smith causes the middle class and civil society to lose. The IFE-INE did not and will not comply with the formation of a democratic civic culture.

Impersonating indigenous people, transgender people, women, and even constituencies, is something more than common in the country.

The INE will disappear along with the neoliberal model and we will all once again be colleagues in the sector and party. In the future, the lack of liberal democratic culture in the country will be paid dearly. The middle class and marginalized minorities – such as true indigenous people and non-Mexicans – always lose. It is illogical that the subjects attached to these sectors are referred to as the heroes that the moment requires to safeguard the transition. Liberal democracy has failed miserably in Mexico and the approaching political Darwinism causes orphanhood and absence. The failure of the IFE/INE is followed by the collapse of a legal-political-social approach that developed the electoral system of the last thirty years. Neighborhood and plebeian democracy is what can be seen on the horizon.

The muscle of the extreme right against AMLO

 The muscle of the extreme right against AMLO

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero

The campaign for the presidency of Mexico will not be a sunny day and the middle class constitutes a participatory agent of the streets that can make a pilgrimage to the right

A question echoed in the narrative of various political analysts after the visits of Xóchitl Gálvez and Claudia Sheinbaum with Mario Bergoglio, as well as the March in Defense of Democracy: How many divisions does the Pope have? How strong does the Holy See have?

The electoral campaign in Mexico has begun and the competing groups are beginning to manifest their power.

After the failure of Eduardo Verástegui and the search for the independent candidacy, the Mexican extreme right seems to clear up the accusation of infiltration and make evident the capacity to convene in the configuration of the political class that will occupy the presidency of the republic in the next six-year term.

Although the allegations about a progressive ecofeminist regime remain anecdotal, the truth is that a tandem of businessmen, intellectuals, civil servants, opinion leaders, religious people and various urban middle classes; They are dissatisfied with the “strange” project proposed by the Fourth Transformation in the person of Claudia Sheinbaum.

The call in multiple cities in the country and some important points abroad was no less.

Civil Society, Dresser's middle-class Frodo, is fighting for the institutionality of a dimension of private law, the rationalist autonomy of a part of the public sector, the market and the incursion into the Western world.

The vision of the protesters in the marches called by the extreme right implies the adoption of a civic electoral modernizing path.

When talking about conservative and right-wing groups, this fact constitutes a quantum leap.

Catholic nationalism is shocked by democracy; However, he seems to understand the inevitability of open societies for the survival of all.

The impact of the various pink demonstrations by the INE and Democracy must be acknowledged in Morena.

The campaign for the presidency of Mexico will not be a sunny day and the middle class constitutes a participatory agent of the streets that can make a pilgrimage to the right because the conservative revolutionary nationalism and the pragmatism of Morena, increasingly detaches itself from a Mexican path towards North American modernity.

The middle classes go with the right not only because of aspirationism but because of the Morenoist incomprehension of legitimacy in modern urban times.

Denying the importance of the pink demonstrations and discrediting the clean message of honest actors can reduce the electoral quota that the Fourth Transformation hopes to obtain.

Faced with a scenario of divided government, the understanding of governability must involve the entire country. Mexico is everyone's game.

Eduardo Verástegui and the digitization of signatures

 Eduardo Verástegui and the digitization of signatures

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero 

The presidential candidate of the extreme right in Mexico has indicated that technology dislocates his proposal to participate in the 2024 elections. Although there are a couple of months left for Verástegui to gather the number of electronic signatures necessary to fulfill the requirements that the National Electoral Institute demands, the task seems titanic without the support of the powers that be; particularly the religious and economic ones.

What is happening with the electoral strongholds of the extreme right? Well nothing. That it is truly difficult to use digital applications, the INE platform and the available time of supporters in any organization, to individually incorporate support for candidates or parties. Once again, although the defenders of the INE and its cyber elements believe otherwise, it is more than true that the door has been closed to form new political parties, formalize independent candidacies and support social causes against the Mexican government.

Even though the PRIANRD believes that the INE represents the liberal democratic channel through which everyone can participate in favor of the Mexican interest; it isn't true. INE technology serves to maintain the status quo of the contemporary partyocracy that denies political participation, individual and organized, in a more than totalitarian way. Technology cannot be an instrument to exclude people; However, in the case of political participation it can be attested that it harms the legitimate right to vote and be voted for.

Citizen candidates cannot participate in the face of the technological judgment represented by the digitalization of individual support. Organizations that intend to become political parties at the regional or national level find it more than impossible to hold assemblies or gather the necessary militancy to meet the requirements that the electoral laws request. It is time to think about opening the doors of the electoral system in our country in the face of a reality of partyocracy and transfuguism.

Digital mafias and lobbyists at the service of internal groups of the INE manage to charge several million pesos so that they can compete with traditional political parties. The same thing happens in the party system as in the fields where some members have structured the monopoly: soccer, transportation, television, radio or newspapers. It is necessary to pay expensive floor fees over a long period of time to remain in the circuit, as is still done in the case of many notaries.

A democracy that closes its doors cannot be considered such. Hence, it is essential to modify the electoral system in Mexico and, within it, the rules for integrating and financing parties, as well as the difficult area of citizen candidacies.

The INE. cultural montage

 The INE. cultural montage

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

Companies are forced to live in regimes of limited participation by oligarchic groups and authoritarian public officials like Córdova himself.

A few days ago, the former president of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova, interpreted the results of the Latinobarómetro survey in light of the role that the IFE/INE has played in the construction of the Transition Model via Competitive Elections.

In addition to hypocritical lamentations, the racist and authoritarian official commits the excess of attributing the social disenchantment of democracy with the Fourth Transformation.

The way in which sectors sympathetic to Lopezobradorism, as well as the holder of the federal executive power, are judged negatively, shows that Córdova could never affirm himself as a neutral arbiter of the electoral processes in Mexico, much less as the positive channel of Mexican democratic consolidation.

AUTHORITARIANISM

No society prefers authoritarianism, the cretinism of the former INE adviser and his intellectual chapel spreads.

Companies are forced to live in regimes of limited participation by oligarchic groups and authoritarian public officials like Córdova himself.

Throughout its history, the IFE/INE forgot its commitment to civic culture and democratic education. It is not only that the people have the government they deserve, as Lorenzo Córdova wants to say; is that the INE never did anything to control the voracity and authoritarianism of the political class, mainly the neoliberals, whose most extraordinary case was the 2006 elections under the immoral arbitration of Luis Carlos Ugalde.

DISENCHANTMENT

The disenchantment with democracy is not only the responsibility of society but, mainly, of organizations such as the INE -on a national and local scale- and of electoral officials such as Ugalde and Córdova, exalted practitioners of bureaucratic patrimonialism and electoral concessions.

The political transition via competitive elections was only a cultural assembly headed by intellectuals at the service of the hegemonic historical bloc that never materialized participatory democracy, fair arbitration and authentic recognition of popular preferences.

The INE and the OPLEs are monuments of bureaucratic patrimonialism and political science fallacy. Ugalde, Córdova and company represent snobbery and intellectual imposture to recognize reality.

The current political circumstance not only demonstrates the excessive cost of electoral councilors and organizations, as well as their uselessness.

The current context has triggered a democratic deepening that has surpassed the coyote of the electoral official and generated a political agonism thanks to which it has been possible to recognize the real values of the multiple political tendencies and their factions; mainly the racist, pro-Yankee and classist right.

The INE, under the direction of Córdova Vianello, never respected the will of the Mexican people who attended the 2018 elections. Like Ugalde, it entered Mexican history on the side of discredit, and it will stay there.

The cultural montage of the electoral organizations is so untenable that even the Broad Front abandoned it.

Mexican democracy is not the liberal capitalist democracy as anyone with a minimum of comparative politics knows, and the Latinobarómetro should adjust its measurement instruments to other indices and variables.

The theory of the State at the end of neoliberalism

 The theory of the State at the end of neoliberalism

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

Are the autonomous bodies and intermediate bodies part of the State? In a strict sense the answer is affirmative, but it is also important to consider the subordinate position in this regard. Suddenly it becomes urgent to review the theory of the State because in the new defensive doctrine of autonomous and independent organizations, everything is being confused in a malicious way.

What is the obsessive sense of pointing out that autonomous, independent, decentralized or public bodies are more State than government? In the past, it was an administrative matter to change the names of organizations of this type, their disappearance or creation. A truly serious thing would be the disappearance of the government, since the autonomous organisms would not have the capacity to generate governability or order, authority, legitimacy and control. These organisms are not important to unite the country or to contribute to the political system.

The discussion is important to establish because there is serious malice on the part of constitutionalists and political scientists attached to the PRIANRD and increasingly distant from scientific analysis. Cesar Cansino was not wrong when he wrote about the death of political science. In recent times, the theory of the neoliberal state will end up considering that the nation is also imaginary.

The false civilist, autonomist, pseudo-democratic and unfortunately anti-Mexican discourse; hides an authoritarian, reactionary, conservative and pro-Nazi streak. There is no liberal or anarchist thought in them, they are old and new conservatives. Reason why his real interest is to destroy the Mexican State.

The new architects of the public space are constructing paths of anti-state rhetoric that they pass off, paradoxically, as statists. During the prolonged neoliberal night, it was maintained with authoritarian dogmatism that there was no more important issue than diminishing the State, cornering it and making it transparent by all possible means. Made. Was it useful for something? Do you remember Enrique Peña Nieto? The results are plain to see, neoliberalism dismantled the Mexican state and created a welfare state for oligarchic businessmen, brought Mexican society to its knees in the face of the powers that be, and established a golden bureaucracy expert in collusion and political concertation. All of the above was carried out based on the argument of the Lilliputian dwarfism of the Mexicans and the benign civilizing work of the market. His methodology only allowed the return of the PRI. And they keep talking about the PRI State as the best.

The Peñanietista six-year term was the concrete result of that neoliberal dogma, for this reason the society decided to change the political economic model in 2018. The society chose to rebuild the State of the Mexican revolution and limit the power of the hegemonic blocks, mafias, businessmen and groups of interest.

The autonomous organizations were constituted as facades of an invisible power that dedicated itself to looting and corrupting all the structures of the Mexican State. The first people responsible for the mud on democracy and the terrible populism were the neoliberals. Instead of continuing to defend the islands of corruption and looting that autonomous organizations represent, the best thing to do would be to propose a new State model, a post-neoliberal State.

The democracy of the INE does not combine with popular democracy

 The democracy of the INE does not combine with popular democracy

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

Liberal democracy does not have a good strain in Mexican society due to the colonialist caste system; even this is known by its defenders who represent not a social class but the vertex benefited by the pigmentocracy.

The IFE/INE was a failure from the beginning, but it constituted a new space for negotiation between the political parties and the PRI, between the clerofascists and the populists, to carry out concessions and graduate the radical democratic impulse of the masses. The electoralist pact constituted a form of Spanish canovism, that is, trading power alternatively, as had been done before within the Revolutionary Family.

Democracy in Mexico, due to the nature of its social relations, is generated outside of the political parties and the INE. Even outside the government. It is corporate, neighborhood, populist, neighborhood, small-town, union, cooperative and school. Ordinary people develop spaces for collective action however they can, because the different levels of government do not attend to them. Society understood that "democracy via competitive elections" was the game of the PRI members turned defectors and accepted by the PAN and PRD.

While the powers that be, partisan institutes, the media, liberal intellectuals and aspirational bureaucracy; defends the INE thinking that Mexico is Denmark or the United States, Mexican society survives the governmental orphanage of all political parties and autonomous institutes.

Jacobo Molina's motu proprio resignation shows that the INE was a space of looting and corrupting neoliberalism, it does not even have the capacity to defend itself. Where are the “true democrats”? The INE self-destructs because it never defended democracy or developed a civic culture. The factions that controlled the institutional electoral environment are coup leaders or cheaters; even both. They go to direct confrontation with the presidency of the republic because, as Lorenzo Córdova said, they are not equal; They are worse.

Pablo González Casanova has insisted for several years that Mexican democracy does not go through political parties, the government and much less the INE. Participatory, collectivist and mutualist social mechanisms exist independently of all. May it continue like this for the good of all.

The Cancellation of Plan B

 The cancellation of Plan B

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

The conflict between the neoliberal faction that is represented in the PRIANRD polypartisan pragmatic alliance and the political project of the Fourth Transformation, has taken an extreme difference in regard to the dispute over the INE. While the neoliberals bet on maintaining the electoral structure that bogs down the Mexican political transition in a delegative democracy, Lopezobradorismo gains in popular sympathy and confirms before society the hypothesis of institutional autonomy as a reference of the factual powers. The cancellation of Plan B does not contribute to weakening President López Obrador; Quite the contrary, in front of the bulk of the population he is transformed into a republican and nationalist Caesar who could count -if the polarizing spirit continues- with the social support to promote a reform that removes the hindrances of the old Mexican regime.

Delegative democracies lock the countries that maintain them in vicious circles. According to Guillermo O'Donnell, a sultanist government like that of Rafael Moreno Valle in Puebla and a progressive democrat like that of José Mújica fit into this context. The question is that the quality indicators of democracy, human development, economic growth, competitiveness, human rights and, above all, accountability; they are always on the decline, that is, failed.

Does defending the INE mean protecting Delegative Democracy? Of course. The trajectory of the Federal Electoral Institute and later of the INE, are accomplices and responsible for the delegative democracy that has made the interregnum between the old and the old regime in the country eternal. Critics of Morenista populism do not want to understand that they are the cause of radicalized social movements that destabilize the Mexican political system due to the meager results of neoliberal governance.

The exponential growth of vulnerability and the precariat in Mexico explains the arrival of the Fourth Transformation. Why does the PRIANRD defend a senile institution like the INE that no longer adjusts to the democratic challenges that Mexico faces in a post-covid world? Does the PRIANRD hope that the cycle of delegative democracy will last as long as the hegemonic dominance of the old Official Party? It seems that it is so.

Luis Carlos Ugalde has been one of the media references to observe the process that the debate regarding the INE has followed. The joke is only told, they say out there. But it is worrying that in addition to using the most retrograde forms, the defenders of the INE are also interested in polarizing as much as possible. They say they don't want civil war, are they sure?

The Mexican Episcopate and its defense of the INE-Habsburg

 The Mexican Episcopate and its defense of the INE-Habsburg

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

Democracy via competitive elections in Mexico, the long voted transition, died because it did not produce any improvement for the country, specifically of not influencing or certifying the development of the quality of democracy. After 2006, what has become evident is that the electoral arena is part of the bureaucratic patrimonialism that does not want to change and that, in the face of the crisis in the post-covid world, does not understand the need to rebuild the national state. The INE/IFE strengthened discretion, concerted concessions, caciquil feuderalism and corruption. The electoral route was only enough for the delegative democracies that produce so much ungovernability in Latin America, the electoral advisers -especially after Woldenberg- never worried about developing the bases of liberal capitalist democracy in society and, above all, in the rulers. The INE/IFE represents the democratic failure in Mexico.

In order to analyze the intervention of the CEM in what transcends the INE, it is important to observe the way in which PLAN B affects the interests of the prelates and clerical bureaucracy. What affects the country's important religious leaders is that the electoral reform harms the golden bureaucracies -including that of the INE- and takes away the space of influence for the organizations and intellectuals of the Mexican right. The intransigent catholicity tries to maintain its territories of influence, those that allow it to lobby and manage the evolution of the country. Some of the INE advisers maintain important links with the geopolitical purposes of the Holy See, but also with the economic classes that benefited from the neoliberal model. Lorenzo Córdova represents what Latin American sociologists call the “Habsburg Model”, that is, the feudal, patrimonial, caciquil order, based on the Iberian caste system and, above all, on the exploitation of an impoverished mass sustained by hunger. millennial. And don't you understand the reasons why populism has a Latin American patent? Loris Zannata, in the UNAM magazine, explains the deep roots of Jesuit populism. Catholicism is as populist, or more, than AMLO; with a difference, lopezobradorismo seeks to regenerate the Mexican State and catholicity only thinks of the Spiritual Absolutism of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire that, sometimes, not even the Habsburgs themselves understand, as is the case of the poor Austrian fool they brought to Mexico to promote another Counter-Reformation.

During the long electoral transition the political capital of the Catholic Church was extended to too many institutions of the Mexican political system; furthermore, the interventionist nature of the Holy See's uncompromising integral Catholicism is felt in various quarters. Morena's reform seeks to separate the INE from the powers that be. Hence the complaint from the high bureaucrats of the Mexican Catholic clergy, who are defending their fields and do not want to lose capital, influence and budget.

The political scientist Fredo Arias Kung has established critical paths to Christian democracy in Latin America and particularly in Mexico for its inability and complicity to inhibit a liberal, capitalist and modern society. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy in Mexico is linked to oligarchs, drug traffickers, abusive businessmen, caciques, authoritarianism and populism: Were Onésimo Cepeda and Marcial Maciel interested in the question of democracy? One only has to trace a little in the lineage of the high clergy to understand their attachment to the Habsburg Model of the Feudalist Treasury. The Ecclesiastical Bureaucracy and the Christian democracy are the least interested in a democratic transition; indeed, the historical ruptures would annul their capacity for intervention, management and manipulation.

The CEM uses the political thought of Catholic nationalism attached more to fascism than to democracy, they do not care that the country develops, but that Mexico continues under their control. Even in the CEM, political thought prior to the Second Vatican Council prevails and they don't even come close to learning what Mario Bergoglio seeks to change global Catholicism. The CEM's defense of the INE will be respectable when they first address Pope Francis and Liberation Theology.

Around 1924, the Delahuertista rebellion -supported by the high clergy- ended up causing a more than deep division in the armed forces and, at the same time, the influence of the United States in matters of political succession. Subsequently, the Mexican bishops manipulated the Cristero conflict to enter the political system and cohabit with the Revolutionary Family, a coexistence that they continued until they reached power in 2000 to consolidate the Habsburg Model of society and avoid democratic consolidation. The advantage in the neoliberal model was for the right; However, as Arias Kung says, they were not interested in an authentic democracy, they did not seek ruptures or transformations so that Mexico would change politically, socially and economically. Neoliberalism deepened bureaucratic patrimonialism for the benefit of the exterior; now, revolutionary nationalism only tries to compensate the impoverished masses and the state historically. It is fair and necessary.

Woldenberg, Presidential?

 Woldenberg, Presidential?

Diego Martin Velazquez Caballero

The march in defense of the INE generated varied perspectives on the behavior of civil society and the conservative opposition in Mexico. One of the points that stands out is the proposal to place José Woldenberg as one of the candidates to lead the opposition candidacy for the presidency of the republic. In addition to the many significant errors that the march for the INE generated, this idea of ​​launching Woldenberg for the conquest of the federal government is a sign of the bias of the PRIANRD alliance and its affection for the Americanist referees.

During the final stage of the PRI's hegemony, the IFE developed more than a citizenization process, a stage of withdrawing control of the elections from the federal government. However, if one is to be honest, this reality never happened. The different governments, of the different parties, of the different administrative levels, get into the kitchen of the elections and nothing can be done to prevent it. Citizenship was a mask, cotton candy full of poison, to hide the truth, that the political and oligarchic class does not allow society to participate in the free election of its rulers. Even the ill-gotten citizenship was followed by the prosecution process that -as every Mexican knows- only benefits lawyers. In this last sense, for example, if legal intermediation has been more successful as an alternative mechanism to solve public and private legal problems, we already understand what judicialization means: corruption.

José Woldenberg did what he could, which was very little. It is true that independent elections were achieved that allowed alternation. But it didn't help much, democratic quality in Mexico never existed and the elections only allowed PRI members of all political parties to govern us.

Woldenberg's departure from the IFE ended up revealing a stinking and corrupt institution where the moches for the elections were arranged. It is not Woldenberg's fault but those who followed.

So, then, what could Woldenberg do now? Any. As he did in the nineties. Gradualist changes that never achieved something positive for Mexican democracy, there are the indicators of the three decades of democratic transition via competitive elections. The Mexican transition lacked democrats and the IFE/INE is the one that needs it the most.

Worse still, according to Maurice Duverger's elitist theory regarding Real and Apparent Bosses. The march in defense of the INE revealed the inner circle that rules over Woldenberg, you don't need to be a great political scientist to understand that they are using, corrupting, the figure of Woldenberg to implement his disgusting interests. Woldenberg in the presidency would be a puppet of the worst Mexicans.

The electoral reform in México. Will Win?

 The electoral reform in Mexico. Will Win?

Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero 

The proposal of the Fourth Transformation to renew the Mexican electoral system has ignited a singular debate to reconsider the democratic consolidation of the country. With everything and the polarization regarding the procedural and contentious sphere, the electoral institutions in Mexico have plunged into total disrepute. Organizations and courts that were configured as spaces to develop citizenship, legality and democratic political culture; they finally appeared like any other cacique corporatism space. The greatest seriousness corresponds to the onerous costs and the corruption of the legal-electoral structure in a society with so many deficiencies. Without wanting to admit it, the INE is one of the main institutions responsible for the Failed State, it negotiated to impose the worst rulers of all time.

Despite the cacique interests in the electoral fields, this has not been an obstacle to the development of intelligent proposals for many years. The history of electoral institutions is very interesting; however, it depresses how little influence it has had. Manlio Fabio Beltrones's contempt for Giovanni Sartori, for example, constitutes the constant of the invisible power that controls bureaucracies, budgets and progress of the INE/IFE/OPLES. All the effort to study the Mexican elections never served for anything, the Beltrones always prevented any attempt for a serious debate regarding the electoral system that Mexico needs. And there they remain. A few years ago, Denise Dresser terribly lambasted the INE, and now she defends it. What power do the Beltrons have to force someone like that?

Woldenberg, Reyes Heroles and hundreds of other electoral studies have pointed out the importance of Proportional Representation and the Second Round in Mexico. Multiple academics, study centers, thinkers from the different parties, have pointed out that a system of competition and proportionality is more important than the arbitrator. The country has always had excellent scholars of comparative electoral systems, but the political class does not listen or pay attention to them. They are good for student, doctrinal, training courses; but until there. The astonishment of the PRIANRD is ridiculous, they also had a formal academy in this regard.

Reinventing the electoral system in the country is essential to revive political parties and inhibit the promiscuous, turncoat and primitive alliances that the current state of affairs has led to. If the INE is not refounded, if the electoral system in the country is not changed, the political parties run the risk of becoming extinct and that the cacique de facto powers take the free rein of the country.

Political parties in Mexico are entities of public interest, they constitute the peaceful way to fight for power and the agonistic channel so that our differences flow, feed each other and learn. Without parties there is no democracy. The civic education schools are the parties, not the INE.

The political crisis in France is a scenario that must be taken into account for the Mexican case: without parties, any criminal can be president. Who is Macron? What does Macron represent? Nothingness, interventionism, imperialism, inside and outside France. French suicide is a reality and nobody does anything.

The INE must disappear so that the political parties return to their leading, partial, differentiated, intelligent, purposeful role. It is unfortunate the state of all the political parties in the country and to see the way in which the Cacique has closed the door for new party institutes.

Hopefully the debate and the conservation instinct of the political parties manage to design and implement an electoral reform that is right.

Transfuguism and Plot. The characteristics of the transition via elections

Transfuguism and Plot. The characteristics of the transition via elections

August 17, 2020
Diego Martin Velázquez Caballero

https://www.semanarioelreto.com/single-post/2020/08/17/Transfuguismo-y-Contubernio-Las-caracter%C3%ADsticas-de-la-transici%C3%B3n-v%C3%ADa-elecciones

Why does Mexico continue under the electoral route scheme to build its democracy? Although political scientists called the model of the Mexican transition “Via Competitive Elections”, the data on corruption, fraud, vote buying and corporatism leave much to be desired about the importance of the Mexican electoral system. Rather, the electoral system becomes the judicial political arena where political factions resolve their differences. The Mexican transition should be called: Political transition via judicialized elections. And if it is remembered that the Mexican political system and the foundations of the Nation State were built by lawyers, perhaps this characterization is understood. Lately, the Mexican judicial system created mediation structures and houses of justice precisely to demonstrate the importance of reaching agreements due to the prolonged and rugged condition that judicializing things implies. The Mexican judicial system is corrupt, incompetent and incapable of providing justice. The judicial processes in Mexico are dark, onerous and long - if not infinite - that few decide and endure to maintain. Hence, “mediation” has been implemented as a cultural and economic way to accommodate reparation, but not justice, in litigation.

However, the creation of the Mexican electoral system generated a special section of the contentious sphere in electoral processes, few countries in democratic consolidation have special courts for electoral matters and political rights trials. In reality, these ways constitute spaces for collusion and a pact - not always honest or definitive - that tempers the radicalization of the actors.

Justice is unattainable and, therefore, perhaps these forms are the best possible in cultures such as Mexico. The electoral system of our country has not been able to combat the vices that characterize the political tradition, although citizenship allows us to recover evidence of improper acts or contradictions to inform public opinion in the way that the electoral course had, this is not a guarantee of a fair electoral process, power groups negotiate and the results can be convenient or immoral to society. In the end, it is the correlation of forces that determines the product of the negotiation. Democracy, then, becomes the marketing of the popular will.

Although this was proposed as an innovator in the creation of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), now INE (National Electoral Institute), in reality it happened within the Institutional Revolutionary Party and only with the sectors that made up the revolutionary coalition. The priistologists wondered about the mode of distribution of the candidacies in the PRI and the presidential succession, thanks to hermeneutic studies (Garrido, Ai Camp, Crespo), mathematical (Gil / Schmidt) and fictional (Castañeda and Álvarez Mosqueda), we found a negotiating table where the cliques made agreements and had radical measures to enforce them. The president of the republic was a “primus inter pares”, the great hegemonic elector; but, a mortal god. Every political succession involved this form of negotiations. The model was transferred to the Mexican electoral system in its judicial dimension and, now, instead of negotiating the PRI cliques, they negotiate the oligarchies of the parties - where, by the way, many PRI members were transferred.

Manuel Camacho Solís always held the idea of ​​a change without rupture, which is why, perhaps, in the form of inertia, that has come to mean the Mexican electoral system. A romantic table of national reconciliation will hardly occur where a form of stony and eternal political order is defined. Spain, Chile, Greece, Portugal and the countries of the ex-communist bloc, built a form of political negotiation that consolidated democracy in a dynamic way unlike our country. The unfortunate thing about the Mexican case is that the judicialization-negotiation does not imply electoral justice or true democracy, but basic agreements to overcome political competition and where, as in the Mexican legal system, those who have more money to buy the judges and do the best show, they are what they manage to impose. The recent scandal of the oil company Odebrecht and its derivations reveal the way in which corrupt lobbying influences elections and the shaping of economic interests. Why haven't the political registration of the PRI and PAN been taken away?

Manuel Camacho Solís, one of the main political strategists of salinism and lopezobradorism, proposed the idea of ​​"change without rupture" for the Mexican political system, since doing so would generate ruptures, breaks, fragmentations, could lead the country to catastrophic scenarios of ungovernability and dissolution. Like Jesús Reyes Heroles, time and reality have come to prove them right. Mexico still lives in the old regime and the more it tries to get out of that space, the more it ends up sinking and tying the historical knots of the Mexican political system.

The political transition consists of a historical break, a change of regime from the theoretical perspective that you want to propose. This phenomenon has not occurred in Mexico, the political alternations move under the protocol of the old regime.

With Morena and AMLO, the phenomenon of political participation occurred, which generated a massive vote to avoid fraud and electoral bureaucratic tricks. However, the pragmatic alliances of the National Regeneration Movement fill Q4 with contradictions and make López Obrador's campaign promises unfeasible. Despite the fact that President Andrés Manuel enjoys a broad electoral base, he has had to coexist with prianism and, even, admit radical ultra-right cadres into the public administration. In the integration process to reach state and federal governments, Morena included eminent politicians from Acción Nacional as well as Catholic nationalist groups and humanist businessmen, who had not found candidates in the PAN or were excluded. AMLO received, uncritically, a considerable number of intransigent integral Catholics linked, or not, to the reserved societies and who occupy important positions in the public administration at the federal and state levels.

The right is experiencing a process of disintegration of the party that traditionally brought them together. The PAN presidential candidacy and the 2018 electoral process generated a civil war of the right-wing factions that culminated in the departure of several cadres and contingents of the PAN to independent movements and the National Regeneration Movement.

Jean Meyer wonders how a government would have had from the synarchist perspective. By 2000, and twelve years later, Mexico could not to establish the government that the Cristeros imagined, nor that that the Christian democratic intellectuals proposed.

Neoliberalism was an economic regime that subordinated politics to its interests without contempt for who governs. Thus, then, rather than building a “Mary Help of Christians” throughout the country, what happened was the establishment of a series of pacts with various powers of the matter –particularly drug trafficking– to maintain governance. National Action could not make a regime change, a historical break; on the contrary, the electoral arena is the negotiating table, the Moncloa Pact, where the actors negotiate the interests of the citizens.

The PAN was characterized by taking the teaching corporatism and caciquil power to correct political alternations and, at least, know the public administration at the federal and state levels. Suddenly, they appeared as respectable PAN members, former members of the Revolutionary Family and the neo-PRI generations. During the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, a PRI administration of the country can be seen in the formulation of public policies such as "The Pact for Mexico" and the electoral negotiation-agreement.

In contrast to the Catholic nationalist politicians who went to MORENA, some more decided to integrate front groups such as FRENA (Frente Nacional Anti-Amlo) and, in an ambiguous way, radicalize their positions so that the yunquistas and Tecos, who are in the administration public of Morena, obtain better positions and charges; Or, to form a political position that - now - is concentrated in the Citizen Movement or in local political institutes that aspire to build citizen candidacies away from the progressivism that 4T represents and according to the development of the political crisis as a result of COVID and its effects . Also, abandoned from the PAN, is a religious right that opts for an apocalyptic discourse and points out the importance of Donald Trump being re-elected to contrast the war waged against Western culture by Asian countries - particularly China - and Islam - fundamentally the one developed in Europe. For this last trend, what is important is that a West is formed around the United States and that the Catholic Church is in charge of purifying Christianity based on the geopolitical model of Eastern Europe. The members of the apocalyptic right, even delegitimize the papal authority of Mario Bergoglio and opt for a Tridentine tendency close to Ratzinger.

The element that will define the behavior of religious rights is constituted by the North American elections. At the geopolitical level they will have to decide whether to support Biden or Trump, according to the hegemony of Russia and China to develop. The advance of Chinese civilization is more dangerous for uncompromising integral Catholicism since the current government is not distinguished by religious tolerance and respect for human rights that Catholicism has found in other societies, likewise, because within China, the Catholic Church is insignificant.

Hence, while Catholic nationalists within the Morenoite government advance and remain silent, radical Catholic groups in FRENA and Movimiento Ciudadano, rebuild the anti-communist rhetoric (Although they do not directly attack China) and seek to promote a crusade for Western civilization that approximates Donald Trump as the contemporary Saint George or Ronald Reagan.

AMLO has fallen into the vicious circle of Mexican-style negotiations. Catholic nationalism operates as it has always been doing. In a long-term perspective, the Empire of the Holy See seizes every opportunity. Morena is in detention and unable to fulfill her campaign promises. This is a point in favor of the groups that do not have the same flags as Morena and many points against those who voted for Morena and expected great transformations. Morena will deliver little of what he promised in the campaign and runs the risk of being a great disappointment.