After the polls closed in Mexico on June 7, embattled President Enrique Peña Nieto stepped up to claim a victory that he didn’t win.
“In Mexico, democracy advances,” he declared triumphantly in a polished television address. He announced that the Mexican people had expressed their will through institutions and channeled their differences through the democratic system.
Though there are calls throughout Mexico for the president to step down, there was nothing conciliatory about his speech. He called the voter turnout—which fell just under 50 percent—a “mandate to reject violence and intolerance and work together toward prosperity and peace.” He touched only obliquely on pre-electoral conflicts over protesting teachers, disappeared students, and other controversies. He threw down the gauntlet to the thousands who have protested neoliberal educational and privatization reforms by concluding, “The reforms are going forward.”
But in reality, the results of the elections were far from a vote of confidence for Peña Nieto’s government—or even for the electoral system itself.
