The Flawed Selection of Flawed Candidates

There’s been a flurry of general commentary in recent days about the upcoming electoral campaigns, regarding a) the undemocratic method with which the candidates are selected; and b) the worry that parties are insufficiently prepared to avoid the influx of drug money into campaigns.

Here’s Jorge Buendía, addressing Problem A:

A party with two or more pre-candidates [i.e. primary candidates] will be at a disadvantage in front of the “autocratic” party. The new legislation reduces the campaign timeline, but through introducing the primary campaign, it opens a space that the parties utilize today.

The internal democracy can bring electoral advantages for a party. In a primary election, the pre-candidates can become known, gain media coverage, and awaken citizen interest.

These objectives, nevertheless, are impossible to reach in elections to elect candidates to be deputies. Internal elections of this type generate little interest among the population and the media. Aside from that, before the new law, parties and pre-candidates have limited resources to promote each one of the 300 contests. In the cases in which there are primary elections, few voters will be aware.

Lastly, what will the criteria that party activists and adherents will use to evaluate the party leadership: electoral triumphs of the degree of openness in the selection of candidates? I suspect that the victories will weigh more heavily.

Ricardo Raphael tackles the same subject, but is more dejected in his conclusion:

Our democracy now travels along the path that takes us from bad to worse. Now it seems that for the upcoming federal elections, if you aspire to stand as a candidate for deputy, either you are a good friend of the parties’ principal leaders or you file away your desire to participate to use in a better moment.

The present political class –mediocre and petty—is not willing to lose even one seat in the train cars that pass by its door. The methods that are being used to select the parliamentary candidates have been placed in the complete service of the highest levels of the party.

Germán Martínez, president of the PAN, explains that in his institution they have taken such an arbitrary decision with the purpose of “guaranteeing the citizens that the candidates aren’t going to be linked with organized crime.” It’s a declaration with the aroma of a rotten lie.

Martínez's excuse may be more one of convenience than of reality, but, as I mentioned above, the effort to isolate the candidates from drug money is occupying a lot of attention these days, so it's not a totally off-the-wall explanation. Carlos Loret takes on this topic, and, instead of savaging the PAN, he is harder on the PRI, which he says, though marginally more democratic in its selection of candidates, hasn’t taken sufficient measures to counter the influx of drug money.

The interest of the criminals centers on mayors and governors that can put police at their service, but the penetration is such that there never before has been a greater risk that in the Chamber of Deputies is there exists, with legislators from various parties, a “Parliamentary Caucus from Organized Crime.”

When they talk about the topic, politicians from all the parties put on their “national security face,” but they don’t succeed in inspiring confidence that the campaign armor will resist the cannon blasts from the drug traffickers.

There are attempts. The IFE [the Mexican electoral authority] will put the names of all the aspirants and their teams into the hands of the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Finance Department so that their bank accounts are monitored. If they want the agency to reach its goal of modern and real-time oversight, they will have to allocate more personnel to the task.

The PGR, Cisen, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Public Security will collaborate with the parties that solicit investigations of the candidates about whom they have doubts, so that they “check off” their aspirants, despite what the parties promise to utilize as mechanisms of control.

The problem is that distrust is in the middle of everything. The reasonable suspicion is that if information is exchanged, if confidential data is placed in the hands of a political adversary, this will be used electorally. They’ve sworn that they won’t. But they don’t believe each other.

Furthermore, inside the federal government and even the IFE they are criticisms of the PRI: it’s the party that has accepted the fewest concrete measures to attempt to contain the narco-campaigns, such that they think that if the elections were today, it would organized crime’s easiest access to political power.

Taken together, Loret and Raphael seem to demonstrate an inherent conflict between democratic openness and the exclusion of drug money in politics. It’s a conflict that many argue is illustrated by Mexico’s recent history: as the country has democratized, drug money has had an increasingly prominent role in the nation’s politics. There’s an element of truth to this, but it certainly wasn’t inevitable, nor, more importantly, is it necessarily permanent. This post is already quite long, so I’ll elaborate at a later date.