The hair of the donkey

Populism, in addition to being useful for winning elections, has other positive features, such as serving as a corrective when politics has distanced itself too much from the marginalized. Experts acknowledge that populist governments generally pursue irresponsible long-term public policies for electoral gain, but accept that this can also benefit the less fortunate, if only in the short term. Given that there are some good things, why would we be against populist regimes? In the words of Jan-Werner Müller: “Populists should be criticized for what they are: a true threat to democracy.” Our President, who has already accepted being a populist, has proclaimed his democratic fervor, just like the rest of the leaders of the self-named 4T; However, the evidence refutes them. Among the indices that measure the quality of democracies on the planet, the three main ones are Global State of Democracy Indices (GsoD Indices), prepared by The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA); he Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), prepared by the University of Gothenburg; and the Democracy Index, prepared by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). According to the first, Mexican democracy has regressed since 2018 in the four areas it monitors: Representation, Rights, Rule of Law and Participation. In the V-DEM classification, our democracy was ranked 71st in 2018, but by 2022 it fell to 87th. More forcefully, since 2021, the EIU no longer considers that there is a democracy in Mexico, not even an imperfect one, but a hybrid regime with a tendency towards authoritarianism. The impartiality of the three sources, their independence and the three results pointing in the same direction make the conclusion incontestable. There is no point in referring to “other data” or assuming that there are hidden personal enemies in Scandinavian universities, much less arguing about conspiracies of neoliberal foreign conservatives who would have lost privileges here. The data is simply overwhelming: during the current six-year term they have decimated Mexican democracy. According to the political scientist Maria Casullo, populist regimes do not usually last more than 12 years in power, but they cling to it by violating laws and undermining institutions. This could explain why the 2024 Federation Expenditure Budget, approved last Thursday, includes cuts to the INE and the Judiciary, but increases to the Welfare Secretariat, responsible for social programs, making it the one that will have the most resources next year. year (electoral) and that the military controls more and more tasks, as well as nine times more budget than in 2018, the equivalent of 20% of public investment. And it does seem to be irresponsible that, of the 9 billion pesos approved, 20% is based on debt. All of this is worrying because, as he said Norberto Bobbio, the democratic State and the liberal State are interdependent and when one falls, the other falls. In other words, if our democracy has already gone backwards, our freedoms could be marching to the wall, blindfolded.

UNICORN

Perceiving democracy threatened by populism trump, the Democrats devised two possible strategies: the first they named “unicorn”, because it was easy to explain, but illusory: that the anti-Trump Republicans would reveal themselves by forming a new party; The second was for Democrats to co-opt “future ex-Republicans.” It sounded ridiculous and was difficult to explain, but true. They called this the “platypus strategy.”