Thread by @Edourdooo

Vicente Fox, who in 2000 became the country’s first democratically elected president, had earlier been president of Coca-Cola Mexico and then head of the company’s Latin American operations.

Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) had supported the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from the beginning, voting for the constitutional amendments the PRI needed to implement the agreement even as it continued to denounce the PRI’s imperious rule.

No surprise, then, that telecommunications tycoon Carlos Slim, a long-time PRI supporter who became the richest man in Latin America as a beneficiary of the party’s privatization program, stated after the election that Fox “has the best intentions of moving Mexico forward.”

The Clinton administration applauded Fox’s victory as “a triumph for democracy,” as if all along it had been part of the school that believed there could be no democracy in Mexico until the PRI was ousted.

Gore and Bush, as interchangeable as Fox and Labastida when it comes to markets and trade, were caught flat-footed by the PRI’s defeat. Fox aides said that prior to the vote, both had snubbed overtures from his campaign and that the tempestuous Fox was livid.

Within weeks of the election, major problems emerged, including Fox's distaste for confrontation and his rejection of get-tough politics with the PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades until Fox became president.

One exchange offered a glimpse of why Fox's promised revolution — to slash crime, create millions of jobs and supercharge the economy by reforming antiquated tax, labor and energy laws — never got off the ground.

Fox likened himself to Lech Walesa, whose election as president of Poland was a historic blow against Soviet communism, but whose transition from crusading candidate to head of state was "not very smooth."

“Inside Poland, becoming larger than life proved a mixed blessing for Walesa.”
jstor.org/stable/27551580

A loner who seemed insecure and almost bombastic in showing his importance, Walesa became isolated as president partly because he surrounded himself with people who played on that 'personage' image.

Under pressure from the Catholic Church, in 1991, religion was made a mandatory school subject, with grades.

Abortion regulations were also tightened.

As Charge d’Affaires from 1983 to 1988, and then Ambassador from 1988 to 1990, John Davis shepherded the Solidarity movement toward democracy: regularly hosting leaders of Solidarity and other political prisoners at his residence.

Davis described Walesa as having “an almost messianic sense of mission that he was the one to lead Poland into the future.”

In Solidarity's version of the constitution, the state's legitimacy was based on a community of Poles unified by a shared Catholic tradition.
jstor.org/stable/2500923

In Mexico, AMLO’s anti-system rhetoric led voters to question the nature of political power in Mexico’s new democracy. His ascent badly damaged the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
journalofdemocracy.org/articles/latin…

Mexico’s peculiar combination of numerous independent voters and a structured, three-bloc party system is a legacy of competitive authoritarianism under the formerly dominant PRI.

Mexico’s transition away from dominant-party rule also took place not through sudden regime collapse, but gradually through the ballot box.

In too many parts of Mexico the rule of law is weak, and criminal organizations confront public officials with the choice of 'plata o plomo' — a bribe or a bullet — that all but forces holders of the public trust to become complicit with criminal agents.

Criminal groups in Mexico have been using violence to try to influence candidates, and establish their power over local and state politics.

Election season in Mexico is a whirlwind of impassioned debates and confetti-strewn rallies — and a steady stream of intimidation, threats and deadly attacks against candidates.
latimes.com/world-nation/s…

The best-known case in Mexico's recent history is the 1994 assassination of presidential aspirant Luis Donaldo Colosio at a rally in Tijuana — a slaying still shrouded in conspiracy theories and doubts about the official story that it was the work of a lone gunman.

In many ways, organized crime has more interest in local politics than in national politics. Control of city halls swells gang coffers and provides a path to broader influence as “bought” office-holders ascend the political ladder.

Criminal syndicates seek to infiltrate police forces, seize smuggling routes, corner public funds and patronage jobs, launder illicit proceeds and expand opportunities to extort money from local businesses.

Public anger at these persistent problems put the PAN and the PRI in a bind. As the two parties that held the presidency since Mexico’s democratization in 2000, they needed candidates who represented a “fresh start” in independents’ eyes.

AMLO’s denunciation of a cynical ruling elite that he called a “rapacious minority,” utterly out of touch with the plight of ordinary people, was a holdover from prior presidential runs.

20th-century history bore out the conviction that a Free Poland was a prerequisite for a Free Europe.
prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/polands…

Polish statehood was restored after the collapse of the various Holy Alliance powers in 1917-1918, then snuffed out again by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.

Poland was in chains during the Cold War era, only shaking them off in 1989. In so doing it initiated the course of events leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and an independent, western-oriented Poland taking its rightful place at the heart of a “Europe whole and free.”

Communism’s collapse had heralded not the departure of Russian despotism, but the arrival of American militarism and capitalist exploitation.

The rhetoric emanating from Warsaw under the PiS has become indistinguishable from the toxic reactionary agenda pushed by Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

Senior Polish ministers have warned of the dangers associated with the “mixing of races,” while pro-government media outlets peddle conspiracies about George Soros flooding the country with non-white migrants.

In parallel, the country has endured an anti-democratic counter-revolution, with democratic institutions established since 1989 slowly strangled by the assertion of direct ruling party control.

Regularly censured and sanctioned by EU institutions, ignored by western decision-makers, and now deprived of a political ally in the White House, Poland has gone from poster child of post-communist transition to a scorned and resentful pariah at the heart of the EU.

The anti-Western sentiment is also aired by the government’s allies in Poland’s ultra-conservative Roman Catholic church.

Whereas many in the West — as well as Poland’s many liberals — revere Enlightenment principles as the foundation of modern conceptions of equality, democracy and human rights, much of the Polish right sees such conceptions as inherently suspect, even sinister.

This disconnect was of lesser importance during the Solidarity era, when Polish liberals and conservatives had been united by a common enemy in the communist regime.

Even as the old Solidarity alliance descended into bitter infighting after 1989, there remained a consensus within the elites that Poland’s destiny lay in aligning with the West.

Liberals got a democratic constitution designed to protect minority rights, while religious conservatives were sated by a legislative-constitutional “compromise” that severely restricted access to abortion.

Whatever consensus there may once have been has frayed, as Polish conservatives respond with rising horror to the steady liberalization, secularization and globalization of Polish society.

They railed against modern notions of democracy and human rights, portraying them as sinister concepts deployed by “leftists” to impose secular totalitarianism through the back door.

Some Poles in Britain resent the non-whites they often live alongside for giving “deserving” migrants a bad name. At the same time, they resent the white majority, whom they accuse of benefiting from their labor while making little effort to understand their experiences.

One Polish far-right leader claimed that the disillusionment of young Poles who had spent time in Britain contributed more to recruitment than any media campaign could ever achieve.

This antipathy is reflected more widely in contemporary Polish right-wing discourse, which regularly seizes on events in the UK and other western countries, like the once staunchly Catholic Ireland, as evidence of how once-great cultures are succumbing to left-wing nihilism.

Ever since PiS started to dismantle the country’s democratic institutions, commentators have struggled to agree on how the state of Polish democracy should be described.

Successive generations of Polish authoritarians — communists and nationalists alike — have stoked anti-German sentiment to check the drift of liberal values from across the River Oder.

The result is the concept of Germany, and by extension the EU and the West more generally, as a hostile foreign invader determined to impose liberal social and sexual mores by force.

A “Homo Empire,” as the cover of a mainstream Polish conservative publication put it a few years ago, which seeks to eradicate religion and national identity in the 21st century as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had sought to do in the 20th.

On the campaign trail, for example, President Duda declared that “LGBT ideology” was more “destructive to man” than the Soviet-imposed communism endured by his parents.

A similar chauvinist paranoia underpins the years-long stand-off with the European Commission and the European Court of Justice over the government’s subjugation of the Polish judiciary.

Alejandro Moreno, the leader of the old ruling PRI, shot back “they are the traitors, and they haven’t solved the crime problem and have left women abandoned,” referring to increasing homicides against women in #Mexico.
apnews.com/article/busine…