Politics: Administration’s Second-half Focus

MEXICO - Report 23 Dec 2015 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

---

The second half of the six-year administration of President Enrique Peña will be defined by two major issues that are interlinked: the effective implementation of the structural reforms that were passed during the current government’s first year in office, and trying to manage a presidential succession process that has gotten underway earlier than usual. Its success in assuring a future for the administration’s project beyond 2018 will depend largely on whether society is convinced that the reforms are working and that they are having a positive effect on their daily lives.

The success of the administration’s first year and a half in office gave way to the political crisis and crisis of credibility that erupted in the latter part of 2014. By that point, the public concluded that the government had lost its focus. The administration was seen as having become preoccupied with introducing legal changes that entailed bringing diverse power groups into conflict in an effort to accelerate economic modernization, but that it had also failed to bring about positive changes in the lives of the citizenry

With the exception of security, for which many more laws and initiatives are needed, the challenges now facing administration no longer entail the design and implementation of new government projects, but developing a firm and intelligent political leadership of public administration that can produce an efficient implementation of the reforms, for which more qualified personnel, clearer objectives, more implementing laws, as well as greater emphasis on the “demonstration effect” in establishing credibility are needed.

Without a doubt, the most significant challenge will be on the level of demonstration effects. It is hard to think of something more present in official discourse than combatting “corruption”, although so far such talk has yet to translate into serious action. The legitimacy of anticorruption actions will depend on their effectiveness. As long as people fail to perceive that the reform is progressing and generating tangible changes in relations between the citizenry and its authorities, the reform will be a dead letter.