told us, this was from the very beginning the candidate of the establishment, and i like the law of that pour spective or jorge's perspective about pena nieto being seen, perceived and scrutinized as an incumbent, someone who was going to be more of a referendum on him, when in fact in theory he should have been the sop pigs. so that was the other position. the pri will probably have to cede more in terms of negotiations. because they do not control a simple majority either in the lower or upper chamber, some of the usual suspects, 11 deputies will become pivotal to pass many reforms and therefore this is someone who remains at the core

of today's power bloc, alongside the party. in the aftermath of the very question 1988 elections, probably we could say those were neither legal nor legitimate because there was never a vote count. remember, the votes went up in flames, mysteriously, in the basement of the chamber of deputies. that's a long story. that's '88 but the key point is that the pri and the p.a.n. struck a deal which allowed this modernizing agen da to start to take effect. could you very well see pri and parts of p.a.n., p.a.n. traditionally a very cohesive party, party with strong ethos as is now, you know, suffering internal factionalism, people are running to the boats to save themselves. and so the pri will be able to play with b.a.n., some of

p.a.n., it will be able to play with panal and verdes. you've got an executive for at least the next three years will be probably the strongest than the last three presidencies. another surprise very quickly, i am not going to go into it because jorge already gave his presentation but certainly my sense is the polling industry suffered an existential crisis. the industry became politicized. the industry, of course, depends on credibility, depends on people believing, they say. i think a majority of mexicans think that pollsters, a majority of pollsters tried to shape rather than to reflect reality, and that this was done in a consistent manner, in favor of the candidate of the establishment. realities, in as much as the pri

won, is this a return to the past? all the newspapers in here, in spain, the u can, in mexico itself, have been raising this question. there is no return to the past. there was no caro compleo, an entire power block behind you. it remains alive and kicking without some b.a.n. support both in the upper and the lower chambers, pia nieto's reforms won't be able to be as ambitious as he might want them to be, particularly labor, energy, fiscal reform and something regarding social security, so no return to the past. the pri will have to keep wheeling and dealing but this time from a position of power. keep an eye on the questioned legitimacy, keep an eye on the social networks where jorge showed a clear advantage, those

who are members of the generation of social media and given the ripple effects that social media has on the ground, and on real time, we will keep watching that because this is a new factor in civil society. i'm not saying they're going to save democracy from the hands of the cynics, but certainly i think there is a point that can be made. do they become absorbed into the political system and end up like many social movements in the u.s., in europe, finally coming into one of the main tents, or do they remain out there, trying to advance accountability, not only of the government, but also of the opposition? another issue regarding reality, the left, i think, strengthened

its core power in the capital city. that was, you know, a 40% plus victory by the prd. joy showed us those very important numbers as well, by far their largest voting in the state of mexico city with around 7 million voters, morelos, guerrero, and others. now the problem for the left is that this is a great anomaly. they control the neuralgic center of the country and some parts of the south, but little else, and my prognosis, i wish there was a modern left in mexico. mexico from my perspective badly needs a progressive agenda, an agenda that prioritizes social justice. mexico is now one of the four most unequal countries in latin

america, just, you know, neck and neck with countries like brazil, colombia, and some of the central american countries. mexico badly needs social justice, but the left, my prognosis is bad. i don't think the left can do too much. it remains too fractious. many of them came from the pri so they have the same habits. it's vertical control, nationalism, redistribution is rhetoric, but in reality it's practicing ma tick and more often than not, much more often than not self-serving. challenges, the candidates were trying to outbid one another. p.a.n. and pri had gone for a relatively conservative agenda regarding economic issues. as amlos started soaring in the polls, may/june, they had to adopt that and therefore they adopted the language of subsidies to electricity and

gasoline and, you know, cheaper credit, so there are lots of promises out there. this is going to be a process of how to manage the process of frustrated expectations, and with 90% plus of the federal budget already earmarked, there's little room for maneuvering. so lots of promises. how are you going to deal with that? that's one for pena nieto. two more minutes and then i finish. second challenge is, you know, the pri has been saying we will continue the fight against organized crime. at the same time that we bring down violence. wow. so how do you square that circle? that's the big one. that i think could make or break the legacy of this president. they've come out with something which appears to be trying to bridge things, saying, well, we're going to base our new

measure or measuring success, we're going to change metrics. it's not going to be the number of kingpins that we catch and extradite to the u.s. it's not going to be the amount of narcotics that are interdi interdicted. it's going to be the number of citizens per 100,000 that get killed. okay. you can read many things into that. i like it. i like that, because i have family, friends, acquaintances in mexico who have been terrified the last five years, who lifterified, middle class people, professional people, going on about their lives, terrified, and the last one, of course, is the need to inject dynamism into the economy. you all know the story about the monopolies, this is a rent here, the economy, and of course the great difficulty here is the coalition that enabled this

concentrated economy to thrive has been basically crafted by bitsmen and pri and p.a.n. politicians, when either of those were incumbents. my sense it's key for this person to really do something the first 100 days of his term, lay down the roots of what will be either strong or weak leadership b.a.n. authority. as we said the pri is a practici pragmatic party. if his colleagues see him as an effective person, they'll gain popularity. it's far from ideological, it's very practicing ma tick. his first 100 day also really allow us to see if, you know, there's really a break with any of these three important challenges that i pointed out. thank you so much. [ applause ]

>> and then we're going to take advantage of dr. mareno being here at the wilson center for two months and ask him to just give us a few comments, not a formal presentation but welcome his insights as a former member of the efe and professor here. >> thank you for inviting me to give some comments. i have to begin saying that i do agree with most of that, except i really enjoy their analysis and i think that their speeches were very complimentary in some sense. i mean, they spoke to the practicing ma ti pragmatic issues of the pri, of the losing of the way of the mexican government which is, in

my opinion, the first point to remark, to say that the government lose the election, and among the struggle with the pri, then the prd, we are forgetting that the government, the mexican government has lost the election and we have to see a little far, why the mexican government lost the election. this is in my opinion the first point to say. there is a lot of things to say about it, perhaps the mexican government lost the election because the inequity, because perhaps the security, this strategy, which is a very closed strategy, as francisco said before.

it caused 0,000 people killed, assassinated in the last six years. perhaps the mexican government lost the election because the conflict into the a.p.n., into the governmental parity, there was a big conflict into the governmental party before the campaign and during the campa n campaign, perhaps the government lost the election because of the witness of the candidate josefino basquez was not as strong a candidate as pena nieto. she was a very weak candidate and not only a weak candidate in terms of her proposals, her programs --

stay loyal with president calderon and all the costs upon the government went to her, went to the candidate of a governmental party. but anyway, one of three or four things, the cost of the social inequity, the cost of the strategic fight, the crime and the organized crime, the cost of the weakness candidate or the loyalty to the actual politics, there is a combination, a mixture that ran to the government, who lost this election, and this is something important to say. second comment is that the pre won the election, as joy said

before, the pre won the election long before this 2012. i do agree with that analysis. not only because strong way to govern in the local field of the mexican politics, but because the prd abandoned the political negotiation. i think that it was important that the prd, after 2006, abandoned the institutions, abandoned institutions trying to go with salvador to build a new movement, a new social movement, the so named morena, which was a kind of an organization to keep salvador on the polls and to

give him the personal power to go again to this new election. so the prd went to a new struggle inside the party. the prd lived a very, very tough struggle between the lopi lopis alador movement and the cuchos, the cuchos is the names of leaders of the prd because they are jesus hombrano and joe success ortega so the cuchos were were trying to go with the party and into the negotiation with the government of calderon against the position of

lopres alvador fighting against the government of felipe calderon. so it was a great division into the prd, and i think that this is another reason to see the prd losing these new election. i have to say as well that enrique pia nieto was firmly supported by the television as francisco gonzalez said before, by the television networking, and as francisco said before, we need another kind of explanation, jorge, about the polls, because there was a big mistake in the results, and i think that it is not enough to say that the reason is in the design of the ballots. i think there is another kind of reason, technical or political

reasons, and that we have to fight it out, because people is thinking that half of the people in mexico is thinking right now that the polls was working to make pena nieto win, and this is part of the problem of the legitimization that we have right now. this is something to explain and we need to be explained about it. i believe that the last question to say, is there any chance after this election to abort the democratic process in mexico? this is important. if the transition of the

consolidation of democracy in mexico is going to be back to the past as a consequence of the return of the old return of the party to the party, and of course, i have not an answer to this big question, but i have to think that there is a possibility to stop the democratic process or to get into a big or a huge problem of the democratic process, because at last three reasons, the problem of legitimacy, i insist that half of the population in mexico think that this was an unfair election, think that there was a fraud. it's half of the population, and it is not easy to go on with

this lot of people thinking that there was a fraud. i think there is a big risk with the democratic process, because the offensive of the purity and lopis salvador i have to say against the electoral institutions, they don't believe on electoral institutions. they don't believe there is enough rules to go with elections, and we can't be sure that we are going to have another reform process in the next year, but we cannot be sure about the costs of this new electoral reform, because it is very linked with the political reform as a whole, and with re

need to grow up in terms not only of economic growth, but in terms of social equity. so in the next three years we will say. i think that we can be sure about it, a very huge negotiation tried to get everything in the same pot, and it could be very difficult to deal with. the second is the weakness of the government, of the actual government to lead with the political conflict, right if there is a big political conflict, and could be right in the end of the period. we have not to think only in the first 100 days of the new government, but in the last 100 days of this government and i think this is a challenge, a big

political challenge, and i am afraid that there is the risk of the criminal organizations which could see the transition to a new government as an opportunity to strengthen their actions. there is a problem, a real problem with the criminal organizations. yes, on the other hand we have a new and stronger civil society. we have a new and stronger public opinion, that's the truth. we have another political revolution of the free press and a more extended coalition, as we have seen, of the people and especially of the jung people in mexico with a new agenda, the new kind of agenda. not the old agenda, too, which

was about transition to democracy, but a new agenda with problems like human rights, like public education, like social inequity, and the lack of accountability. this is not an electoral agenda per se. this is a new agenda with concerned with the way that the government has to govern, and of course, we have to go after the elections to get this agenda in the way that it works, i think it works. this is my comments. >> thank you. >> thank you, marty. [ applause ] >> i want to do a couple things since we had to reorder hay little bit. i want to give jorge a chance to respond because there is a public perception that the tv industry was biased in favor of

pena nieto. there is a perception that the polling was biased in favor of pena nieto or one of the other candidates so i want to give you an opportunity, then we'll take two or three questions from the audience very briefly and then we'll call on pablo gutierrez from the ois to wrap things up. >> thank you. well, i think that the criticism against poland and mexico, we can divide mauricio said between political reasons and technical reasons. addressing the political ones, most of the polls, or practically all the polls two weeks before the election were more or less on the same pace. obviously we have to look into what happened. of course, the easy explanation is to say that electoral

preferences change. all the polls that were published were conducted one week before the election. we know that one out of five voters one week before the election still had doubts about whom they would, whom they could support on election day. secondly, as i showed you, the groups of lapes salvador did better, these are the more volatile in political terms groups in mexico, even during the campaign if you look at the preferences of these groups, they show a lot of change, so probably there was something to it, some volatility, but i want you to think about the political argument, when i hear the argument that say that public

opinion at that point shaped voting behavior, i think that's a very condescending view on voters. what it means is that the thing that matters most for voters was who was ahead in the race. it didn't matter the state of the economy. it didn't matter the killings. it didn't matter the level of poverty. as i showed you, there are a lot of reasons behind a person's boat and the exit poll data show that voters reacted to that. those who were unsatisfied were more likely to vote for lopez salvador and also for pena. but i think that we have to put into perspective all these very, very large number of reasons behind the decision to vote and certainly there will be some people that take into account

who is ahead in the polls but i can tell you that the people were not clear about who was in first place. basically many people think that the candidate they are going to support is the candidate who is going to win and did we ask one week before and there were 51% of the mexican population that said pena nieto was in first place, but the race of the electorate said either lopes salvador or casmota were in first place. secondly it was unclear for voters who was in second place. even those who say that pena was in first place, they were split between lopes salvador or mota in second place. so i think that it is, the impact that it can have on public opinion on voting behavior or the results of

voting behavior is rather limited. this being said, obviously the results of the polls affect the strategic behavior of mexican elites, especially from racing. one of the criticisms is that many candidates or josephina vazquez mota or lopes salvador were unable to raise more money because of the results of polls. that might be true, and that's something, although the funny thing is that it is illegal for a party to get more than 10% of its fund-raising outside of public financing, so 10%, if this happens, i mean, in the first place, they were not allowed to do so, but this really, really can be the main

impact of the results of polls, especially on the behavior of elites. i don't think that on the way people perceive or decide their vote. going back to the technical reasons at least on my side, i have ruled out sampling, the sampling results were more or less of the preelectoral poll were more or less in very close correspondence to the actual result. n no response was neither a factor and so far the more plausible explanation that i have found is the new ballot. i mean it's really, really thinking that in a poll, somebody would cross three different parties or two different parties or several combinations and especially asking voters with a ballot that reflects that the partisan

identities is not as accurate as a question assimilated by a lot about the candidates. we have to focus more on candidates and less on parties. i think that's the way it seems. >> okay, thank you. we're going to take three questions, and then we're going to invite gutierrez up. we have a question here and here and right here, the young man. would you, please, identify yourselves and keep it short so we can get some answers. >> i'm dennis kilbert from hamilton college. my question is about vote buying, vote buying has a history in mexico, as i recall in 2000 there was outrageous vote buying. it didn't seem to have much effect. there's a secret ballot in mexico, i wonder if people don't just take the money or the card or the washing machine or whatever it is and vote for whoever