Back from vacation, I wanted to inform myself about what had happened in Mexico in recent days. I read from cover to cover the principal sections of two papers published in the capital. I started with Excélsior and continued with Reforma. Before continuing with other newspapers, I realized that there was not a single article directly related to the president in either paper. Not one. Zero presence of Felipe Calderón. I inevitably asked: and where is the president?
Unlike that disappearance in the two above papers, I found various articles about Congress and the parties: 11 in Excélsior and five in Reforma. It seemed evident that those who are defining the national political agenda are the party caucuses of the legislature that is about to open. The president, in contrast, found himself in a sort of banishment in the Monday paper, although there did appear some reports, all of them minor, of cabinet secretaries: four in Excélsior and three in Reforma.With the absence of the president and the presence of Congress, the following question that I asked myself is if the situation is an omen of what is to come during the second part of Calderón's term: weak president a strong Congress?
It's easy to oversell the irrelevance of a president after his party loses, and I think Zuckermann maybe does so here. (Although he writes the rest of the column as though it was more an open question than a foregone conclusion.) Calderón will definitely be weaker vis-a-vis Congress in the final three years than he was in the first, but that's built into the Mexican system. Whether he ends up like Bush during his final year (a virtual non-entity) or more like Clinton after the Republicans took over (concentrating on small victories rather than grand agenda items, but still relevant) seems like a question of will as much as anything. If I had to bet, I don't imagine that the post-election quiet from Los Pinos will last a whole lot longer.
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