“This country does not move forward with elections, it moves forward with social mobilization.”
-Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Election nights mark the end of a political cycle and the beginning of a new one for competing candidates. For the winner, it is the de facto start of his administration. The loser, however, has two options. One is to concede defeat and go home to lick the wounds and enjoy retirement living. Francisco Labastida Ochoa, presidential candidate in the 2000 Mexican elections, was famously asked once, “What did defeat taste like to you? Pain, sadness?” “No,” he responded, “it tasted like tequila.” The other option for the losing candidate is to disavow the results and refuse to concede. “To hell with institutions!” exclaimed in 2006 the current president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), when the electoral tribunal ruled that his demand to invalidate the elections of that year was unfounded. This article deals with the second option.
The topic of being a bad loser is timely, given the fears that U.S. President Donald Trump might refuse to concede if he loses the November presidential race. Today, many wonder what would happen in this unprecedented scenario. And well, we Mexicans have a bit of experience with bad losers. Just consider the fact that our president holds an embarrassing record: he has never conceded defeat in his almost 45 years in party politics. Indeed, AMLO has either won every election and referendum he has been in, or cried foul.
To begin with, it is necessary to understand that the objective of refusing defeat is to win at a bargaining table what was not won at the ballot box. The consequences for the polity, however, depend to a large extent on the type of political regime in which the candidates compete.
In a pure authoritarian regime, a bad loser could bring international discredit to the country and even precipitate a social movement. In most cases, however, none of this happens. There is the example of Don Luis H. Álvarez of the National Action Party (PAN), presidential candidate in the 1958 Mexican elections during the heyday of the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Don Luis was a quixotic candidate with zero chances of winning, but who nonetheless was persecuted and threatened on the campaign trail. On election night he refused to concede, calling out the elections for what they were: a gross fraud. None of this mattered and the PRI remained in power for another 42 years.
Things in a regime in transition are, unsurprisingly, very different. The Mexican case is particularly illustrative. As mentioned above, for most of the twentieth century, Mexico was an authoritarian regime of the hegemonic party type. The PRI permitted opposition parties to exist but did not allow them to compete on equal terms. The democratic transition began in 1977 at the behest of the PRI, which sought to provide itself with a minimal patina of democracy. In essence, the transition was a discontinuous process of negotiations between the PRI governments and the opposition parties regarding the autonomy of the electoral authorities.
In the transition period (1977-1996), the Mexican opposition led by the rightist PAN and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) rejected the electoral results continuously. They did it for two reasons. First, because the elections were organized by the government and therefore the results were not to be trusted. Second, because it gave them political leverage in post-electoral negotiations with the PRI.
Note what I am arguing here: the Mexican opposition rejected the electoral results not because they thought they were the winners, but strictly for political reasoning. There were many elections that the PRI legitimately won by mobilizing their vote —although perhaps with a wider margin than what they really deserved. Winning by a landslide was a deliberate strategy of the PRI: it gave them an air of invincibility, prevented internal splits, and increased their bargaining power against the opposition.
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Alejandro Garcia Magos | Radio Free (2020-09-02T19:05:10+00:00) The business of being a bad loser in Mexico. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/09/02/the-business-of-being-a-bad-loser-in-mexico/
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