Might Mexico Start To Reform?

The Economist has an interesting story about developments in Mexico and the possible road to reform in that country.

The new president believes that he has broad political agreement to change his country

“IT IS time to get Mexico moving,” declared Enrique Peña Nieto (pictured) on December 1st in his first speech as the country’s president. As an audience of politicians and diplomats stood to applaud his inaugural address in the national palace, masked youths smashed the windows of banks and hotels a few blocks away. The Alameda park, recently reopened after a $20m facelift, was daubed in graffiti denouncing the new government.

The return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran Mexico in authoritarian style for seven decades until 2000, was always likely to attract protests. A handful of congressmen loyal to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-winger who came second in July’s election, heckled Mr Peña as he took the oath of office, claiming (with no evidence) that he had stolen victory. Attacked on the street and lacking a majority in both houses of Congress, can Mexico’s new president get anything done?

The political conditions are more promising than the disorder might suggest. In his first full day in office Mr Peña unveiled a “Pact for Mexico” of 95 loosely defined proposals, signed by the leaders of all three main parties. He had long expected the qualified support of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), which governed for the past 12 years and shares many of the PRI’s economic ideas. The real coup was the last-minute signature of the leader of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which backed Mr López Obrador’s candidacy. Many of its members remain implacably opposed to Mr Peña. But its leaders and state governors seem willing to work with him. Presidential aides reckon they can do business with more than half the congressmen from the PRD and smaller left-wing parties.

Read the rest of the story from the Economist here.

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