Mexico Likely to Disappoint, Again

With the return of the PRI to the presidency in 2012, two broad views emerged as to what awaited this troubled country. The pessimists feared that the twelve-year experiment with a vibrant yet messy democracy under two administrations of the longtime opposition National Action Party (PAN) would be replaced by the “managed democracy”—more managerial than democratic—that was the hallmark of the PRI’s seventy-one-year reign before Vicente Fox led PAN’s successful campaign to defeat it in 2000. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times captured the optimists’ view when he predicted last year that the return of the PRI would create a Mexican renaissance marked by economic growth and increased geopolitical heft. Proponents of this view believe Mexico’s photogenic new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, will finally enact big reforms and that the country’s global competitiveness would increase as costs continue to rise in China. Both views may be right. But historically, Mexico’s political and economic life cycle has always tended to begin with optimism and end in disappointment.