President of Mexico

 

Mexico

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The President of the United Mexican States is the head of state of Mexico. Under the Constitution, the president is also the head of government and the Supreme Commander of the Mexican armed forces. The current President is Felipe Calderón.

Currently, the office of the President is considered to be revolutionary, in that he is the inheritor of the Mexican Revolution and the powers of office are derived from the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917. Another legacy of the Revolution is its ban on re-election: Mexican Presidents are currently limited to one six-year term. The constitution and the office of the President closely follow the presidential system of government.

Requirements to hold office

Chapter III of the Constitution deals with the executive branch of government and establishes the following:

• Supreme Executive Power of the Union is vested in one individual, styled the President of the United Mexican States.
• The election for president will be direct and according to the current Electoral Law.

To be eligible to run for president, the following requirements must be met:

• A Mexican citizen by birth, with a father or mother who is Mexican by birth, and having resided in the country for at least 20 years.
• 35 years old or older at the time of the election.
• Resident in the country for the entire year prior to the election.
• Not an official of any church or religious denomination.
• Not in active military service during the six months prior to the election.
• Not a secretary or under-secretary of state, attorney general, or governor of a state at least six months prior to the election.
• Not having been president already (by election, or other causes).

The President of Mexico serves one six-year term, called a sexenio, and is not eligible for re-election.

Presidential elections

Presidential elections have been held every six years since 1934 (the constitution previously provided for a four-year mandate). However, only since the year 1994 have these elections approached an acceptable standard of democratic transparency and cleanliness.

The president is elected by direct, popular, universal suffrage. A simple plurality of all the votes cast in the country decides who becomes president and, unlike many other presidential systems, there is no second round. Former President Vicente Fox was elected with a plurality of 43% of the popular vote, whereas his predecessor Ernesto Zedillo won with a majority of 50%. The current President, Felipe Calderón, won with 36.38% of the votes, and less than a 1% lead to his closest competitor.

The History of Mexico has not been a peaceful one. After the fall of dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910 because of the Mexican Revolution, there was no stable government until all the military generals united in one political party: the Party of the Mexican Revolution, which later changed its name to the National Revolutionary Party, and later to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The PRI enacted a strict internal discipline and government presence in the country, and electoral fraud became common. After the country regained its peace this pattern of fraud continued, with the opposition losing every election until the later part of the 20th century. The first presidential election broadly considered legitimate was the one held in 1994, when the PRI's Ernesto Zedillo took office, and in his term several reforms to ensure fairness in elections were made. Partly as a consequence of these reforms the 1997 federal congressional election saw the first opposition Chamber of Deputies ever, and the 2000 elections saw Vicente Fox of a PAN/PVEM alliance become the first opposition candidate to win an election since 1911. This historical defeat was accepted on election night by PRI in the voice of President Zedillo; while this calmed fears of violence, it also fueled questions about the role of the president in the electoral process and to whom the responsibility of conceding defeat should fall in a democratic election.

The role of unions in the new balance of power and future elections is documented in works like historian Enrique Krauze's Analysis of the Corporative System.

Presidential powers

Since the presidential institution stabilized after the Revolution, the president held almost absolute power over the country, decreasing somewhat into the later years of the 20th century. Held as the most important PRI member, the unwritten rules of the party allowed him to designate party officials and candidates, the latter winning every election usually by electoral fraud. So, he had an important (but not exclusive) influence over the political life of the country (part of his power had to be shared with unions and other groups, but as an individual he had no peers). This, and his constitutional powers, made some political commentators describe the president as a six-year dictator, and to call this system "Imperial Presidency". This power reached its peak around the early 1980s, when a grave economic crisis created discomfort both in the population and inside the party, and the President's power was no longer absolute but still impressive.

An important characteristic of this system (its first example the harsh treatment meted out by new president Lázaro Cárdenas to Plutarco Elías Calles in the 1930s) is that the new president was chosen by the old one (as a candidate with an assured win) but once he assumed power, the old one lost all power and influence (no reelection is a cornerstone of Mexican politics). This renewed command helped maintain party discipline and avoided the stagnation associated with a single man holding power for decades, prompting Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to call Mexico's political system "the perfect dictatorship".

With the democratic reforms of recent years and fairer elections, the Constitution has begun to be applied and the President's powers are legally limited. His current powers and rights include the following:

• Supreme executive power to run and administer the country.
• The right to appoint the Attorney General
• The right to appoint the Secretaries of State and all the members of the Mexican Executive Cabinet
• The right to appoint all Mexican Ambassadors
• Supreme power over the army, navy, and air force
• The power to declare war and peace (with prior congressional authorization)
• The power of negotiating foreign treaties
• The power to issue decrees
• The right to nominate Supreme Court justices
• The power to veto laws (and, after a Supreme Court ruling about the controversial 2004 budget, also the power to veto decrees from Congress).
• The right to introduce bills in Congress for their consideration.

A decree is a legislative instrument that has an expiration date and that is issued by one of the three branches of government. Congress may issue decrees, and the President may issue decrees as well. However, they have all the power of laws, but cannot be changed except by the power that issued them. Decrees are very limited in their extent. One such decree is the federal budget, which is issued by congress. The president's office may suggest a budget, but at the end of the day, it is congress that decrees how to collect taxes and how to spend them. A Supreme Court ruling on Vicente Fox's veto of the 2004 budget suggests that the President may have the right to veto decrees from Congress.

Since 1997, the Congress has been plural, usually with opposition parties having a majority. Major reforms (tax, energy) have to pass by Congress, and the ruling President usually found his efforts blocked: the PRI's Zedillo by opposing PAN/PRD congressmen, and later the PAN's Fox by the PRI and PRD. The PAN would push the reforms it denied to the PRI and viceversa. This situation, novel in a country where Congress was +90% dominated by the president's party for most of the century, has led to a legal analysis of the president's power. Formerly almost a dictator (because of PRI's party discipline), the current times show the president's power as somewhat limited. In 2004, President Fox threatened to veto the budget approved by Congress, claiming the budget overstepped his authority to lead the country, only to learn no branch of government had the power to veto a decree issued by another branch of government (although a different, non jurisprudence-setting ruling stated he could return the budget with observations).

Presidential residence

The President's principal workplace and official residence is Los Pinos located inside the Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Park). The President has the right to use this residence for the six-year term of office.

The National Palace, a building facing the Mexico City Zócalo, is used only for national holidays like Independence Day or Revolution Day. It holds some areas open to the public (as an historic building) and government offices.

Succession

Article 84 of the Mexican Constitution states that "in case of absolute absence of a President" the following should happen:

• If Congress is not in session, then the Permanent Commission elects a Provisional President (Presidente Provisional), and then calls Congress to an extraordinary session, at which point the process continues as below.
• If the absence (death, impeachment, etc.) should occur in the first two years of the term, Congress (if in session, or after being called to extraordinary session by the Permanent Commission) must elect, by a majority of votes in a secret ballot with at quorum of at least two-thirds of its members, an Interim President (Presidente Interino). Congress must also call for elections in no less than 14 months and no more than 18 months after the absence of the President; the person elected then will be President for the remainder of the original six-year presidential term.
• If the absence should occur in the last four years of the term, Congress (if in session, or after being called to extraordinary session by the Permanent Commission) will select a Substitute President (Presidente Substituto) by a majority of votes in a secret ballot. The Substitute President will be President of the United Mexican States until the end of the original six year presidential term.

No person who has already served as President, whether elected, Provisional, Interim, or Substitute, can be designated as Provisional, Interim, or Substitute President.

Former presidents

Former presidents of Mexico continue to carry the title "President" until death but are rarely referred by it; they are commonly called ex-Presidents. They are also given protection by the Estado Mayor Presidencial. Former presidents are also given a lifelong pension.

Contrary to what happens in many other countries, former presidents of Mexico do not continue to be important national figures once out of office, and usually lead a discreet life. This is partly because they do not want to interfere with the government of the new president and partly because they may not have a good public image. This tradition can be traced back to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas; after his policies were criticized publicly by former president Calles, Cárdenas had Calles escorted out of the country by military police. Cárdenas himself remained silent on the policies of his successor, establishing a tradition that former presidents should not interfere with their successors.

For example, Ernesto Zedillo holds important offices in the United Nations and in the private sector, but outside of Mexico. It is speculated he lives in a self-imposed exile to avoid the hatred of some of his fellow members of the PRI for having recognized the PRI's defeat in the 2000 presidential election. Carlos Salinas de Gortari also lived in a self-imposed exile in Ireland, but returned to Mexico. He campaigned intensely to have his brother, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, freed after he was jailed in the early days of Zedillo's term, accused of drug trafficking and planning the assassination of José Francisco Ruiz Massieu). Carlos Salinas also wrote a book on neo-liberal Mexico, secured a position with the Dow Jones Company in the United States, and worked as a professor at several prestigious universities in that country.

Three other surviving former presidents, Luis Echeverría Álvarez, Miguel De la Madrid Hurtado, and Vicente Fox still live in Mexico. On June 30, 2006, Echeverría was placed under house arrest under charges of genocide for his role as Secretary of the Interior during the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre.^[1] De la Madrid has served as head of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, a prestigious government publishing house for academic books. Vicente Fox has announced his intention of building a museum, writing a book, and giving lectures. He is currently a widely recognized conferencist, and serves currently as the Co-President of the Centrist Democrat International.

List of living former presidents

• Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976)
• Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982–1988)
• Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994)
• Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994–2000)
• Vicente Fox Quesada (2000–2006)

List of Presidents of Mexico

See: List of Presidents of Mexico

References

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