Looking Long-Term

Enrique Peña Nieto says that Mexico needs to look beyond its immediate problems and start thinking about long-term solutions that look beyond the immediate political circumstances, and endure beyond one presidential term.

This sounds pretty standard political boilerplate, except you really don't hear too much of that sort of talk in Mexico (or maybe the Obama campaign just raised my tolerance for that kind of thing). In terms of fiscal and Pemex reforms, not to mention a successful security strategy, it's also broadly true. If you think about what kind of political situation would lend itself to those sorts of long-term solutions, it's not hard to picture a Peña Nieto administration having an easier time passing lasting reforms than Calderón has. Ideologically, an opposition PAN would probably be more coherent than the PRI has been for the past three years, and one would think that the PRI would line up behind President Peña Nieto's proposals. Both of these facts --a PRI forced to take concrete positions, and an opposition party with more ideological coherence-- would likely be more conducive to significant reforms.