On Sunday, about 49 million Mexicans (roughly 62 percent of eligible voters in a population of 110 million) voted for their next president. The winner is Enrique Pena Nieto, the young candidate of an old party, the PRI, that is often associated with the image of a dinosaur.
Now many Mexicans are left pondering two questions: Will we see the restoration of the old regime, which Mario Vargas Llosa once called "the perfect dictatorship"? And will the next government alter President Felipe Calderón's strategies to fight the drug trade and organized crime? The answer to both seems to be a qualified no.
Vargas Llosa was right about the past. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, functioned for decades like a well-oiled machine, only occasionally feeling the need for physical or ideological coercion. Every six years, the outgoing president, who wielded absolute power, selected his successor. The "system" gave the country stability, order and growth, all at the cost of political development. It engendered theft and generalized corruption and a cancer that grew invisibly within the social body: governmental complicity with the growing drug trade. Mexico was a monarchy in democratic disguise.