First, President Claudia Sheinbaum was asked to be calm in her reactions to what the bellicose (and fickle) Donald Trump does and says, which she has been doing impeccably, and now she is asked in relation to marches and blockades of dissent that have broken out in recent weeks. The last thing we want is a political polarization between Morena and the opposition, in which the Presidency gets involved amid epithets and disqualifications. Balance and equanimity are needed at a time when governability and certainty will be decisive if we want to reactivate the economy.
But just as we demand a cool head from the president, we would have to demand it from ourselves. Politicization makes public opinion hostage to commentocracy and overexcited media, which tend to issue conclusive condemnations and judgments according to their ideological inclinations. The reading made of economic performance is an example.
The Bank of Mexico has just recalculated the growth forecast for this year, reducing it to a meager 0.3 percent, lower even than population growth. It also anticipates that in 2026 it could reach 1.1 percent and 2.0 percent in 2027, that is, just above one percent of the annual average in the first three years of the six-year term. Based on estimates like this, critics have decreed, from now on, the imminent and inexorable debacle of the economy and, therefore, the failure of the 4T Government.
It would be best not to rush, because you could be surprised. Enrique Quintana, director of the newspaper The Financierreported in his column last Friday a revealing statistic. Only during the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) did the country experience a better performance in the first three years: 2.0 percent annual average. With Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), not only did the economy not grow in the first half of the six-year term, it had a decline: -1.2 with the first, -1.1 with the Tabasco native. Both were victims of a tragic international context. Calderón suffered the financial crisis of 2009, while López Obrador suffered the effects of the pandemic. But the first half of Vicente Fox’s six-year term (2000-2006) is not something to brag about either. It barely registered 0.1 percent annual average in the first three years. That is, practically paralysis.
The previous antecedents should lead us not to interpret a reality based on his photography instead of his film. Even if the dark predictions announced by the Bank of Mexico come true, the performance of the first half of Claudia Sheinbaum’s six-year term will have been better than that of three of the four presidents who preceded her. With the above I do not intend to pass off as a good result something that is not, for the simple expedient of comparing it with other worse ones. I just want to point out the need to put things in context before decreeing absolute or catastrophic condemnations.
Fox, Calderón, Peña Nieto and López Obrador had a much better second half than the first, to put it in football terms. They finished with a score higher than what they had obtained at halftime.
And at this point, a parenthesis should be made. With these numbers I am not considering the performance of these governments regarding the issue of inequality or poverty. The GDP of the López Obrador administration was lower than in previous administrations, but it achieved an important change, by reducing the level of inequality and lifting 13.5 million people out of poverty. For the purposes of development, it was lost quantitatively, it was gained qualitatively.
Return to growth. Normally the first year is the most difficult in economic terms because public investment by an incoming Government is usually minimal, while it adjusts public policies and budgets. Claudia Sheinbaum also had the misfortune of coinciding with the tsunami that Donald Trump represents. As we know, the uncertainty in the markets due to the tariff war unleashed by the new tenant of the White House caused a global contraction. In a way it will have come out cheap if we manage to get this a terrible year no term with negative tax.
It is argued that the prediction that Mexico will grow more modestly than the rest of the Latin American countries in 2025 and 2026 is irrefutable proof of the bad Government of the 4T. In reality, the explanation has more to do with the fact that no country is so sensitive to the Trump factor, which today destabilizes and paralyzes investment in the world. Not only because, unlike the economies of the south of the continent, our exports and a good part of national production are immersed in chains linked to our powerful neighbor. Also because of the vulnerability in which border life, tourism, remittances, migration or insecurity issues leave us. The pandemic affected the economy of all countries in a fairly general way; The Trump effect, on the other hand, has a more unequal impact, depending on the vulnerability of each country to Washington. And none is greater than ours.
And, despite everything, the estimate that the country would be growing at a rate of two percent in the third year of the six-year term opens the possibility that the second three-year term will take a positive direction and end with a more than interesting performance. This is not a far-fetched possibility, far from it. The public administration is being cleaned up and professionalized, an enormous effort is being made to balance Pemex’s finances starting in 2027 and leave behind the gap that it represents today, modalities of mixed public and private investment in strategic areas are being explored, industrial parks are being founded, investment incentives are being negotiated for Plan Mexico, bridges are being built with the business community and, for better or worse, the review of the Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) scheduled for 2026 will be left behind.
Nothing guarantees success, but the truth is that we are not condemned to the inexorable catastrophe that we want to decree with a reading taken out of context and driven by a political perspective interested in failure. A failure that would actually belong to everyone. In short, we are experiencing a typical start to the six-year term, although the imponderable this time is Trump. What follows will depend on many things, but history and what is in the works shows that there is a good chance that they will be better than what we will experience in the first two years.
@jorgezepedap