The Fragile Democracy.(The World According to Alan Greenspan)(Commentary)(Mexico)

At long last Mexico has cobbled together tax and electoral reforms -- but not the ones the country needed. Indeed the reforms passed by Congress last week might have been worse than none at all, and will likely make it more difficult to improve matters in the future. In part, this is because the legislation is the result of a peculiarly Mexican version of good old-fashioned horse

trading. President Felipe Calderon's administration wanted more revenue but no new election laws; opposition leaders wanted electoral reform but no new taxes. Both got part of what they wanted. Mexico got a mess.

For starters, the lawmakers proposed an alternative minimum tax along with a slight increase in gasoline taxes. But the two were so watered down that they barely added up, according to the government's figures, to a mere 1 percent of GDP -- an insignificant increase. But the electoral reforms are likely to lead to even bigger problems, threatening the validity of future elections and placing democratic Mexico near other Latin American nations like Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, where ostensibly independent institutions increasingly operate at the mercy of their nations' leaders.

The putative reform is the result of collusion between the three main parties -- PAN, PRI and PRD -- to virtually eliminate the possibility of anyone else entering the electoral arena. Lawmakers, trying to explicitly prohibit independent candidates from running for public office, have made it practically impossible to create new parties. They also established a series of arbitrary and authoritarian restrictions on the content of campaign advertising, speeches and exchanges among candidates. All these changes were rammed through the Congress as constitutional amendments, exempting them from court appeal or international jurisdiction.

At the same time, positive reforms -- bans on the purchase of media air time for campaign purposes and the allotment of state-owned time to parties during electoral periods -- are largely tainted by serious omissions in the law. There is still no regulation in Mexico requiring fairness in news coverage of campaigns. Blatantly corrupt Mexican news organizations regularly take cash and other payment in exchange for publishing interviews with politicians and coverage of their activities. And more than a decade after the beginning of the country's democratization, there is still no current-affairs program on national prime-time television. So by ...