With the future discussions of the most important reforms in Enrique Pe\u00f1a\u2019s administration, tax and energy, the Pact for Mexico has proven its malleability. The agenda bifurcations between PAN members that support opening up the energy sector \u2013 something that PRI refused while in opposition \u2013 and a PRD who is eager to be taken into the picture after several years of political auto-isolation, should be handled with care if the President were to materialize his reforms. As of now, with the approval of the Fiscal Miscellaneous resolution (not quite a tax reform or a social one), the first obstacle has been dealt with. In this opportunity, PAN was the one who \u201clost\u201d and PRD \u2013 or a part of it \u2013 to assume itself as the tilt of the scales. Perhaps Gustavo Madero and his group had already foreseen such a result and, possibly, this story could be told the other way around by the time of the energy debate.
\nThe attempt of a PAN section to postpone the approval of the energy reform until 2014, as well as the voices of some of its legislators to \u201cend the involvement\u201d within the Pact of Mexico, have not been supported by the party\u2019s leadership. In the Chamber of Deputies, Luis Alberto Villarreal, the PAN party whip in Congress, and Juan Bueno, vice-coordinator of economic policy, have stated that they\u2019re ready to receive the Senate draft when it\u2019s issued. On the other hand, David Penchyna, president of the Senate\u2019s Energy Commission, has stated that he trusts in talking with several PAN Senators that are willing to discuss the reform. The most likely scenario is that what happened with PRD in fiscal issues will repeat once again, that is, PAN will end up enabling the approval of Constitutional modifications in articles 27 and 28, even if they don\u2019t vote in a homogenous block. Delaying the matter until February 2014 is quite risky for PAN, especially after \u201cfailing\u201d in the Fiscal Miscellaneous resolution. PAN members would be branded as inept in defending the interests of businessmen and middle class in tax issues, and would also be called careless by \u201cneglecting\u201d the energy reform as some sort of political vengeance. In any given case, PAN members could negotiate a compromise to obtain certain issues by the time of discussing secondary legislation. On the other hand, the government envisions the energy reform as the trademark of its project, which is the reason why PAN vicissitudes might end up being redeemed.
\nLastly, it is worth asking if PAN could have been better positioned in the roundtable of reforms. It doesn\u2019t cease to be surprising how the party\u2019s members could have chosen a political\/electoral reform as a \u201cbargaining chip\u201d to negotiate the energy reform, instead of, for example, a tax reform proposal more akin to the interests of its potential voters. Was this due to a lack of political skill or was it a strategy conceived within the Pact for Mexico? A clue might be hidden in the timeframe in which reforms were discussed. Strategically speaking, it was convenient to negotiate income and, above all, budget (which nobody is paying close attention to, particularly regarding who will receive the allocation of resources destined for political parties) with the purpose of providing the opposition (understood as the national leaderships of Zambrano and Madero) with guarantees that their adherence to reforms (PRD with the tax reform and PAN, with the energy one) would be rewarded. PRD is satisfied and may oppose the energy reform to restitute its legitimacy as opposition in the face of its clients. It remains to be seen how much PAN will be satisfied as the energy issues come along.
\nNegotiating the energy reform before having guarantees in tax and budgetary matters would have created more distrust towards Madero and Zambrano. Until now, everything seems to point out that the Pact for Mexico has more lives than everyone initially thought.<\/p>\n
CIDAC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the future discussions of the most important reforms in Enrique
\nPe\u00f1a\u2019s administration, tax and energy, the Pact for Mexico has proven
\nits malleability. The agenda bifurcations between PAN members that
\nsupport opening up the energy sector \u2013 something that PRI refused while
\nin opposition \u2013 and a PRD who is eager to be taken into the picture
\nafter several years of political auto-isolation, should be handled with
\ncare if the President were to materialize his reforms. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-3452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekly-political-analysis","tag-political-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4291,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions\/4291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}