Above and beyond the old PRI

On December 1 of this year, after 12 years out of power, a new president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will enter the presidential mansion in Mexico City. Enrique Peña Nieto won Sunday’s elections with a clear advantage, though somewhat less than had been forecast.

At the age of 45 and as he himself has pointed out, Peña Nieto represents another generation, and a different PRI from that which governed Mexico with an iron fist from 1929 to 2000. The country has changed profoundly. It is now a democracy and an emerging (in some aspects already emerged) economy, whose growth will accelerate if it introduces the reforms it needs.

This must be the chief task of Peña Nieto. To achieve it, he is going to have to accept the support of other parties, particularly that of the conservative PAN, whose candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota suffered a comprehensive defeat. Though the presidential powers are extensive, according to provisional results the PRI has only achieved a relative majority in Congress (Chamber of Deputies and Senate); and the next president must be aware that more than one of every two citizens who voted did not support his party. This situation may even be useful as he bids to resist the autocratic leanings of the “old PRI,” which is still in existence.

Peña Nieto can hardly count on much support from the other “revolutionary” party, the PRD. But unlike what happened six years ago, when the PAN snatched victory from him by less than half a percentage point, this time Andrés Manuel López Obrador has no sufficient reason for questioning the results of the presidential elections. Though he attained a better result than had been expected, he probably no longer forms part of the country’s political future.

The PRI candidate has won with a campaign based on generalities. Now he has to work out a real program for government — in three essential dimensions — if Mexico is to have a future of rising affluence that will also benefit the lower strata of a profoundly unequal society with huge demographic problems.

Mexico needs to liberalize the energy sector, opening the state oil company Pemex to private investment; reform the educational system; and set up effective and modern fiscal and judicial systems that might get a grip on the huge ramifications of corruption. Peña Nieto inherits relatively sound public accounts, and an international position of a certain weight.

But the security situation is a disaster. The deployment of the military in the war against the drug trade undertaken by the outgoing president, Felipe Calderón, has not achieved the desired results or diminished the endemic violence. “No truce, no deal,” Peña Nieto has said. In the first remarks made by the former governor of Mexico state, the keynotes have been calls to reconciliation and unity. They cannot be allowed to stand as mere hollow rhetoric, and have to be treated as operational elements of his agenda for action.