Mexico's ruling PRI suffers historic defeat: Trajectory of country's GOP closely mirrors Congress' rise and fall in India

This week, Mexico booted out its president Enrique Pena Nieto, bringing to an end the nearly six-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), a turbulent reign that was marked by corruption and brutal violence. Anti-establishment leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador swept to victory, the first time in nearly a century that it’s not been either the PRI or the Right-wing National Action Party (PAN) that’s been in power in Mexico. Contributing in large measure was to the win has been the presidency of Nieto, under whom the country witnessed historically high homicide rates and rampant corruption. Even for a country awash in violence, the presidential campaign has been especially gruesome, the most blood-stained in Mexican history: 145 politicians have been murdered since September, according to consulting firm Etellekt. On election day alone, three political party members were shot dead. Most of the murders have been of local politicians, the most frequent targets for drug cartels seeking corrupt officials they can strike alliances with. Speaking to The Associated Press, 30-year-old Economics graduate Rogelio Salgado spoke of the chief complaint many Mexicans have against Nieto’s government. “The point is to vote them all out of office, without exception.” [caption id=“attachment_3223710” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Enrique Pena Nieto suffered a historic defeat as Mexican president. Reuters[/caption] Salgado ran down the failures attributed to the outgoing government of President Nieto — low economic growth, murderous gangs and a nonfunctional legal system. “Who wants a continuation of this? People are fed up,” he said. Among the more specific allegations of corruption against the PRI included wild overspending in regional elections, corruption allegations against state governors, and even an attempt to gut a newly-created mechanism to fight corruption. As reported by an article in The Guardian , everyday Mexicans cite corruption as being among the main problems afflicting the country. Mexico also ranked 123rd in the world on Transparency International’s most recent corruption perception index, falling 12 spots since the previous survey. To put this into perspective, India, which also suffers from a crippling corruption problem, was ranked in 79th place. Similarities with India And that’s not where the parallels with the Indian political system end. The PRI in Mexico was felled by years of corruption allegations piling up against it, similar to the manner in which the Congress suffered a defeat in India in 2014. Prior to Nieto’s defeat earlier this week, the PRI had held power for 77 out of the last 89 years in Mexico, including 71 years of uninterrupted rule from 1929 to 2000. It was a historically long run, part of a historically successful party in Mexico, something that closely mirrors the Congress party’s fortunes. The Congress has been in power — either as a majority by itself or in alliance at the Centre — for 55 out of 70 years since India’s Independence in 1947. But despite enjoying power for large swathes of time, the tide turned against the Congress party when a series of corruption allegations started emerging during the second half of the previous UPA regime (UPA-II, to be precise) between 2009 and 2014. This, coupled with a growing perception that the party was being too soft on terrorism, and rising cases of atrocities and sexual crimes against women, meant the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used it to campaign against the Congress, and soon enough, the tide turned against the party that had ruled India for over 80 percent of its history. And that’s not where the similarities end. Pena Nieto, the outgoing prime minister, had a vastly successful initial term in power, somewhat like the one enjoyed by Manmohan Singh between 2004 and 2009. Like the latter, Nieto too spent the first 20 months of his presidency passing a series of historic reforms. He reopened Mexico’s oil and gas sector to foreign investors after 76 years of State monopoly, seeking to kick-start production; bit into the near-monopoly of billionaire Carlos Slim’s company, America Movil, opening the market to more competition and slashing the prices Mexicans pay for cell phone service. And he also introduced evaluations for public school teachers and sought to crack down on corruption, including widespread payments to “ghost teachers” and “ghost schools”. All of this earned him a lot of goodwill. But it didn’t take long for the scandals to erupt. In 2014, Nieto’s wife, a soap opera star, was accused of buying a multi-million-dollar mansion in a posh Mexico City neighborhood from a government contractor in a suspected sweetheart deal. It was something Nieto himself apologised for . A string of governors from the PRI party were implicated in massive corruption. Eleven of them are either on trial, in jail, under investigation or on the run. But even that wasn’t considered as bad as the forced encounters, violence and torture at the hands of police and armed forces. In June 2014, army officers were alleged to have given written orders encouraging soldiers to kill members of organised gangs in night-time operations, as reported by The Guardian . The soldiers executed 15 persons in a warehouse and even altered the crime scene to make it look like a shootout, AFP reported. Later that same year, 43 teacher trainees studying in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared after a clash with the police. The official investigation was marred by lies and the torture of key witnesses, and the case remains unsolved. Historic defeat When defeat did come, it wasn’t just a marginal slip-up for either the Congress or the PRI. The former lost the 2014 polls by a historically low tally; its voteshare of 19.3 percent was the first time in Indian history that the Congress failed to get even 20 percent of votes. Similarly, the PRI was pushed into third place in Mexico with its worst-ever showing, its candidate Jose Antonio Meade winning just over 16 percent of the vote, less than a third of that garnered by the eventual winner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The PRI was wiped out of many traditional strongholds, including Atlacomulco, Pena Nieto’s hometown. Furthermore, the PRI, which had hitherto never lost a governorship, also lost all nine gubernatorial races this year. Similarly, the BJP, which controlled state Assemblies in just five states as of 2014, now controls 20 Indian states, as explained by this article on Money Control. The wheels came off for the Congress in India since the 2014 elections, as the party lost a series of state Assemblies it once controlled, while also appearing to suffer from a leadership vaccuum. The same seems to be happening with the PRI in Mexico as well. It remains to be seen whether the two parties are able to rise again to at least provide a credible political alternative, if not recapture their glory years.