Mexican tea leaves

From my two trips to Mexico I do not remember them to be a tea drinking country. They seem to be a bad coffee drinking people. Fortunately their cuisine and Tequila compensate for this if you can convince them to hold the "picante". But I am sure that this morning tea leaves reading must be all the rage.

The first thing I must say, this being a blog about Venezuela, is that the way Mexico emits its electoral results is something to behold. Calm and composure are never lost even if the difference between the two main candidates is a hair rising hair splitting 1%. You can access the IFE/PREP result form the pages of Mexico El Universal, for example, and see minute by minute how the tally is added, for president as well as for senator, representatives, by state and by district. And this non Mexican blogger can enter without any problem into that web page. Try to get into Venezuela's CNE web page on election or post election day and tell me about it.... I can never cease to be amazed at observing that for all its claim of modernity the Venezuelan CNE is far back in actual "bang for the buck" results. All the electronic hardware purchased at great cost since 2004 seems definitely to have no other reason but to simplify cheating in favor of Chavez.

But enough of Venezuela and back to tea leaves. The same PREP results are good enough to serve us a tea leaves as to the future of Mexico. If indeed it seems that Calderon, with a 1.1% lead now that 94% of precincts reported, is on his way to be the next president (both Lopez Obrador and Calderon claim victory according to THEIR exit polls, so we shall wait a few more hours/days to confirm the winner) we can already say that the Obrador, AMLO for his close friends, campaign was a bust. The man who was a shoo in a year ago has managed through two basic errors to squander his early commanding lead.

The first error was to refuse that first presidential debate. Sheer arrogance it seems, he was too good to lower himself to debate the other guys. Within a couple of weeks of that first debate Calderon had overtaken him and AMLO somehow decided to attend the second presidential debate.

The other error was his dealings with the left, or rather hard left of Mexico. On one side he did not embrace Chavez but on the other side he never really detached himself from Hugo, limiting himself to say that discussing Chavez in Mexico was just a bore (something I will not disagree with). However Calderon did relentlessly pin AMLO down with Chavez, contributing, its seems, in making this a dirty campaign by Mexican standards which are probably not very high to begin with. It would not be a wild guess to advance that the narrow defeat, or even narrower victory of AMLO will be a result of his ambiguity on Chavez, which might have affected the outcome by a point or two, making all the difference in this dramatic photo finish. This in particular would have played well in Northern Mexico where industrialization and relative prosperity make Chavez an easy bugaboo. Look at the lopsided advantage of Calderon in Monterey/Nuevo Leon where Calderon got 48% to AMLO 21%, for example.

In fact, there is in Mexico a case of what will need to be called from now on the Peruvian paradigm: industrialized, modern areas with a forward looking attitude vote for the anti Chavez candidate whereas primitive, backward, traditional areas vote for the Messiah supported by Chavez. We saw this clearly in Peru where Lima and Trujillo areas went for Garcia big time; we saw it yesterday in Mexico where in the North the percentile advantage of Calderon dwarfs the percentile advantage of AMLO in the South and even Mexico city; we also saw it yesterday in Bolivia again where Santa Cruz and Tarija showed a finger to Morales.

So, what will happen to Mexico? And that is where we finally reach the PREP tea leaves. The first thing is of course the deep North-South divide only broken for AMLO in backward Nayarit and Southern Baja, or broken in the South toward Calderon in forward looking Yucatan or tiny Colima (and a strange bucking of the trend in Puebla of the exquisite cuisine, but I refuse to draw a conclusion there).

The second thing, and where the tea leaves start being useful, is the difference between congressional vote and presidential vote. We see at the 8 AM PREP report that Calderon is at 36.5% and AMLO 35.4%. The traditional PRI candidate is at a distant 21.3%. But look at the votes for the Senate. Calderon party, the PAN is at 34.1% whereas the AMLO coalition is at 29.8%, that is almost full 5 points behind Calderon’s PAN. What happened? There are two political movements that show more votes for congress than for president, minor Nueva Alianza (4.2% to congress and 1% for president) and the PRI (27.2% to 21.3%). Clearly many PRI electors decided to make their presidential vote count and went over to AMLO while Nueva Alianza might have probably gone to the PAN.

Campeche shows us how dramatically this happened in some areas. There Calderon squeaks in with a 73K to 71K votes. But when you look at Congress votes, the PAN gets 76K (!!) whereas AMLO alliance drops to 43K, the winner being the PRI which gets 76.5K! Thus militant Campeche of the oil wells, voted for its traditional boss for congress while going to the left on AMLO to be on the safe side. For different reasons but with the same trend we can look at Zapatista Chiapas where the Calderon-AMLO split is 177K to 427K whereas the congressional split is 183K to 366K, with the PRI going up from its presidential 303 to a congressional 359. This in the land of comandante Marcos who fought a war against the PRI and who called for abstention this time. At least there is a good piece of news here: Marcos is sinking into irrelevance as people are probably tired from waiting him to remove his hood.

Thus it seems that the future of the PRI is on how it deals with AMLO and the PRD. This last one is clearly in position to slowly but surely siphon the PRI electorate. If Calderon and the PAN win (the PAN now the main political force of Mexico, talk about a change!) it will be up to the PRI to risk again 6 years of debilitating congressional guerilla and see its base fritters further away to the PAN and/or PRD. If AMLO carries the day, a successful administration by this one with a PRI coalition wished for by a portion of the PRI base might seal even faster the demise of the PRI in favor of the PRD.

In other words, we might not have a winner, but we have a loser: the old PRI of the 70 years “perfect dictatorship”. Mexico has changed.