Politics: Peña's Options for Defusing the Crisis
The clearest political ramification to date of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s grave miscalculations hosting U.S. Presidential nominee Donald Trump has been a further yawning of the political void separating the Mexican people from the president and his government.
With the president’s disapproval ratings already running above 70 percent in some polls prior to the Trump debacle, his support has already been reduced to the share of the electorate that consistently identifies with the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). If his approval numbers fall further in the wake of the Trump debacle, something we believe is highly probable, then even core PRI loyalists would be turning their back on the president. In such an event, the president would have much less influence in choosing the person whom the PRI will run to succeed him in office, and PRI politicians might promote potential nominees from outside the Peña administration.
A president with such depressed social support with just over two years left before his six-year term of office concludes poses a problem of governability, with his ability to generate public support for his administration’s proposals greatly diminished, and an adverse economic environment imposing the need for deep spending cuts that might eventually fuel an upsurge in social discontent.
President Peña may have momentarily squelched a cabinet crisis by accepting the resignation of his finance minister, who had orchestrated the Trump visit, but he also sacrificed his key adviser and main political strategist. Although his choice of José Antonio Meade to replace Videgaray as finance minister will be well received in the private sector and financial markets because he is trusted to guarantee a responsible handling of public finance, the same cannot be said of his choice to replace Meade with Luis Miranda, a political operator unfamiliar with social policy, as minister of social development.
Should there be no more appointments aimed at regaining credibility, President Peña would be signaling that his priority for the rest of his time in office is to keep the PRI in power more than governing in order to overcome the crisis and provide solutions to problems such as corruption and security, or implementing any further reforms. And that would be very bad news.
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