Pri-ification

Jorge Chabat on the PAN after eight years in power: 

The PRI always said that it had to stay in power to consolidate the Revolution. Now [the PAN] must do so to consolidate the democratic change, although in this process democracy itself is the least important element. It turns out that the PAN has become what it most hated: a party that seeks to stay in power only to stay in power. And the worst thing is that all the other parties are the same. 

The PRD repeats and improves the patronage practices of the PRI, and the small parties  don't even hold the same form: the ally themselves with whomever... To summarize, the method of practicing politics is the same as that of the PRI. Perhaps worse: the PRI never pretended to defend democracy, as its adversaries do. 

Chabat is not inclined to ad nauseam attacks against the PAN, which makes this critique all the more damning. At the same time, I'm not sure if his disappointment reflects a disheartening corruption of the essence of the PAN specifically so much as an unseemly reality of multiparty democracy. None of the criticisms he levels would be out of place against the American political parties from time to time. It's the ruling-party cycle: a party arrives with lots of good intentions and ideas, some of which are enacted, some of which are not, and the party little by little becomes more enamored of the trappings of power than the goals that it can accomplish while in power. At some point, the public grows fed up and sends it packing, at which point the cycle starts anew with another party. 

The PAN may have raced through the idealistic portion of its stay in power a bit more quickly than Mexico might have liked, and Chabat is right to place a lot of the blame at Fox's feet. However, even if Fox had used the opposite of the PRI's actions as his only guide in office, the PAN still would have inevitably displayed the same attachment to power that Chabat decries. The fact that the PAN after almost a decade in the presidency displays a certain cynicism about staying in power does not make me fear for Mexican democracy. Nor does it make the PAN anywhere near as bad as the PRI was in its authoritarian years.