Amid Difficult Times, Mexican President Finds Disapproving Public

For most of the past three years, the constants of the Mexican political landscape have been a declining security situation, an economy somewhere between underachieving and freefalling, and the consistently high approval rating for President Felipe Calderón.

These tectonic plates are shifting. Security remains a grave problem, although November was the safest month since May. The economy is still quite precarious, but the production indicators are not as grim as they were six months ago, and analysts are predicting light growth in 2010. But the one staple of Mexican politics that is most conspicuously changing is the rising frustration with President Calderón.

Just as Calderón is gearing up for a second-half agenda that seeks "changes of depth" in Mexico's economic and political system, a handful of public opinion polls have shown that the proportion of Mexicans who approve of Calderón's term - which had been within a couple points of 65 percent for basically his three years in office - is plummeting.

An early December survey from the Mexico City daily El Universal places the president right at the Mendoza line of 50 percent, a four-point drop from the previous month. A poll from the newspaper Milenio released about the same time has Calderón at 49 percent. Other polls show similar declines.

While Americans are used to presidents enjoying wild fluctuations in popularity, Mexico City pollster Dan Lund believes that Calderón's slide is nothing short of a historic change in the relationship between the president and Mexican voters. "You have to take a step back, Mexican presidents' approval rating is not thermostatic, it's not the same as the US president," Lund said.

"Come hell or high water, Mexican presidents are in the high 60s, even when the economy is bad," he added. "What we're seeing now is something that we've never seen before, which is that the approval rating is in synch with nation's complaints."

Beyond their opinion of Calderón, Mexicans are growing increasingly distraught about the state of their country, and the capacity of their leaders to manage its affairs. In the Milenio poll, only 23 percent felt that Calderón had control of Mexico, while 64 percent said things have gotten out of hand. Forty percent said they had absolutely no confidence in him, a number that has leapt by 31 points since last year.

Lund, whose firm places Calderón's approval rating in the low 40s, believes that the climate for Calderón will remain unfavorable, thanks to a very gradual economic recovery with continued job losses.

But Macario Schettino, an economic historian and a columnist with El Universal, finds that less likely. "I don't think [he'll keep falling in approval rating]," he said. "The economy is already recovering, in the next quarter they'll be growth, there won't be inflation, there will be reforms."

That last word is key. The result of said reforms will go a long way toward determining Calderón's political legacy, not to mention the future of the nation with which the US shares a border just under 2,000 miles long. Among the proposals is a political reform that would permit reelection and reduce the number of legislators; a tax reform that would close loopholes and replace declining oil revenue; a labor reform that would make the job market more flexible and encourage the entry of recent graduates and women into the labor force; and a security reform that would centralize the notoriously corrupt municipal police forces.

According to conventional wisdom, a popular president has a much easier time passing his agenda, because the opposition is afraid of the voter backlash that comes with denying a popular leader his wish list. Such logic would seem to indicate that Calderón's game-changing reforms are less likely.

However, Schettino doesn't put a lot of stock in such an argument. "Right now it's clear [to Calderón] that he has until June," said Schettino, "and he has to pass the deepest reforms possible."

Should Calderón's reform drive fall flat, there is, according to Lund, no floor for Calderón's popularity. Indeed, he says that the proper reference for the Mexican president could be Alejandro ToledoAlejandro Toledo, the Peruvian leader who left office in 2006 with the lowest approval ratings in the modern history of democracy.

But under a more optimistic scenario, if the slate of reforms is successful, the constants in Mexican society will change even more. The basket case presented so frequently in the American media will give way to a Mexico on its way to a more effective economic and political system. The prosperous future envisioned by analysts who predict that Mexico will be among the world's primary economic powers by the middle of this century will seem less a pipe dream, and more a reasonable possibility. In which case, Calderón's approval rating would cease to be a worry.