More Zuck

As promised, another column from Leo Zuckermann about the electoral reform. Last year's reform prohibits private spending on television and radio spots, making campaigns the exclusive territory of the political parties. The logic behind this was the potentially malign influence of Mexico's business class, but the solution --enormous power concentrated in the hands of an insular political class-- is hardly any better.

Zuckermann:

To start, the solution doesn't only affect the minority of multimillionaire businessmen that could install a plutocracy in Mexico. It is biased against all the minorities that won't be able to buy advertisements to support or criticize a candidate or party. The Jewish community won't be able to acquire spots that disapprove of an anti-Semite, nor the feminists with a misogynist...Only the parties will be able to talk about politics on television and radio spots. The society at large must shut its mouth in these spaces.

This isn't a trivial concern. In Mexico we live in a democracy whose central axis is the parties. Of course democracy needs parties to work. But you can't take society out of the democratic equation because we end up with a partidocracy.

In fact, the problems is that, these days, the bridges that must exist between the society and the parties have been breaking. Look at all the rules that are designed to increasingly isolated the parties from society. One: non-party candidacies are prohibited. Two: the creation of a new party is increasingly difficult. Three: the internal rules of the existing parties give the privilege of deciding candidacies to their members and adherents. Four: a party doesn't need private financing to survive. Five: there's no immediate consecutive reelection of legislatures, because of which the legislatures don't have to be accountable to the citizens whom they supposedly represent. And now the society can't comment about politics in radio and television spots. The result is evident: a partidocracy of three parties increasingly isolated from society. Is this really the kind of democracy we want to have?

I placed partidocracy in bold because a) it's a lot of fun, and b) you hear it a lot down here. Mexico's parties are a double-edged sword. Compared with most other Latin American countries, its parties are remarkably strong, and this has by and large been to the nation's benefit. After the Revolution, twentieth-century Mexico was basically stable; not coincidentally, there existed a party of Herculean strength. The democratic transition has been essentially tranquil, in large part because three strong parties guided and co-opted the countless individual political passions that exist in a nation of 100 million people. The parties' strength (first the PRI, now all three) made a Pinochet- or Castro-style dictatorship all but impossible, and it has likewise limited the growth of political personality cults.

But it's hard not to agree with Zuckermann. Most of the reasons favoring a partidocracy were more valid four decades ago than today. Concentrating all the broadcast power in the hands of three parties shows contempt for the contributions of individual citizens, whether they are rich or poor. That's no way to run a modern democracy, and it's time for the pendulum to swing back away from the parties.