Mexico’s real election is for Congress

It has been an exciting week in European politics. I’m in Spain, where a corruption scandal just brought down Mariano Rajoy. Spain is near Italy, where the President just refused to ratify a ministerial appointment and then agreed to a face-saving compromise that moved the offender to a less-prominent post. (Ask European steelmakers how that is working out them; Peter Navarro is not Commerce Secretary but seems to be winning the day anyway.) 

So I am going to talk about a place where politics looks pretty boring at the moment: Mexico. AMLO is running away with the presidential race. Miracles never cease, but right now absent divine intervention the presidential race is sown up.

What is left is control of Congress. Moreover, what matters is the ability to cobble together a two-thirds majority in Congress, since so much of Mexican legislation requires constitutional changes. How close is AMLO to clearing that hurdle?

TL,DR: Close! But probably not close enough.

A bit more detail: Mitofsky has polled congressional voting intentions. According to their models, AMLO’s coalition has a 50% chance of winning between 236 and 298 seats in the lower house, with 251 needed for a majority and 334 needed for a supermajority. They are similarly tipped to win between 51 and 73 senators, with 65 needed for a majority and 86 for a supermajority. 

Here you can see the estimated probability distributions for number of seats for AMLO’s coalition. The dotted line shows a majority. 

The AMLO three-party alliance will almost certainly win the house and has a one-third chance of winning the Senate. But it is exceedingly unlikely to win a supermajority.

Does that mean that we can forget about left-wing control of Congress?

No, because AMLO can win support from outside his formal coalition. 

Mexican party alliances are purely transactional. Consider AMLO’s alliance. It includes the Social Encounter Party, a reactionary beast opposed to abortion and marriage equality. These are not AMLO’s positions, although he can be squishy. But Social Encounter is happy to turn left on economics because it will win more seats as part of the coalition. AMLO, in turn, will win low-information voters who might have otherwise voted PAN. In other words, the coalition is transactional, not ideological. 

The main opposition alliance is equally transactional, marrying the conservative PAN to the social democratic PRD and Citizen’s Movement. Once AMLO wins, there is nothing stopping PRD and Citizen’s Movement legislators from voting for AMLO’s legislation should they so choose.

Will AMLO be able to cobble together a supermajority with support from the other left parties?

The modal projection for the PRD is 31 deputies and seven senators. For the Citizen’s Movement it is 29 deputies and four senators. These projections are not independent and should not be combined, because a better PRD result implies a worse result for AMLO’s coalition. Moreover, the methodology is supremely inaccurate; it does not rely on a large enough sample to make true constituency projections.

That said, there will certainly be a working left-wing majority in Congress but likely not a supermajority. The modal result is that AMLO gets 50% of the Senate, plus 8% from the two social democratic parties. He also gets 54% in the House, plus 12% from the social democrats. Still not quite over the top unless there are some big vote swings before the election.

So can we stop now? Not quite.  

The Green Party, you see, is made up of a bunch of mercenary SOB’s who would sell their parents for lunch money. Personally, I do not think that AMLO will offer sufficient lunch money. But even if he did, Green support would not put him over the top in the Senate. 

And now we can stop. It is remotely possible that AMLO will be able to put together a working supermajority, but that is not the way to bet. He will need the cooperation of the PRI or PAN to change the constitution ... and that is before we consider the state legislatures.

I leave whether that is good or bad for Mexico as an exercise for the reader. Thoughts?

Comments

[Kim G]

Interesting. So AMLO won't likely be able to pull off the "Venezualization" of Mexico, then? I'm not personally in the camp that believes that that is AMLO's program in any case. History shows that he was a reasonably moderate, and more importantly, less-corrupt Mayor of CDMX. I'd expect no less as president. And once in power he's likely to moderate his views further. At least I hope so.

Saludos,

Kim G
Redding, CA
Where no one is waiting for the Mexican election bated breath. At least no one else.

[Gabriel Chavez]

Probably good in the long run in the sense that at least the Left had a chance to govern democratically. Change, even if just nominally, is very welcomed in an ossified country like Mexico.

I expect his coalition to falter pretty soon since there's a lot of ideological division even between his own party. I think nobody can say he's socially liberal, and he has plenty of supporters because they think he is. The guy doesn't even support gay marriage, something that's thought crime in most left wing parties.

We can expect very marginal changes, in terms of domestic reforms. Probably mostly related to agriculture, since it impacts the poor the most and it's not that politically relevant. On the other hand, since he plays the victim card like a professional with 20 years of experience, foreign-policy it's going to be an absolute circus, trying to gain support by "defending" Mexico from Trump. I expect him to succeed in this regard.