President of Mexico

The President of United Mexican States is the head of state of Mexico. Under the constitution, the president is also the head of government and the commander-in-chief of the Mexican army, navy, and air force.

Currently, the office of the president is considered to be revolutionary, in that he is the inheritor of the Mexican Revolution and the powers of office are derived from the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917. Another legacy of the Revolution is its ban on re-election. The constitution and the office of the president closely follow the presidential system of government.

Mexico has had a very difficult history, and has not always enjoyed government by a president, having other types of heads of state, including emperors. However, since the end of the Revolution, Mexico has had a presidential system, and since the 1990s, the system has been increasingly democratic.

Requirements to hold office

Chapter III of the Mexican Constitution deals with the executive branch of government and establishes the following:

• Supereme Executive Power of the Union is vested in one individual, styled the President of the United Mexican States.
• The election for president will be direct and according to the current Electoral Law.

• A Mexican citizen by birth, son of either a Mexican father or mother, and having resided in the country for at least 20 years.
• 35 years old at the time of the election
• Resident in the country for the entire year prior to the election
• Not an official of any church or religious denomination
• Not in active military service during the six months prior to the election.
• Not a secretary or under-secretary of state, attorney general, or governor of a state at least six months prior to the election
• Not having been president already (by election, or other causes).

Presidential elections

Presidential elections have been held held every six years since 1934 (the constitution previously provided for a four-year mandate). However, only since the year 2000 have these elections approached an acceptable standard of democratic transparency and cleanliness.

The president is elected by direct, popular, universal suffrage. A simple plurality of all the votes cast in the country decides who becomes president and, unlike many other presidential systems, there is no second round. Current President Vicente Fox was elected with
a plurality of 43% of the popular vote, whereas his predecessor Ernesto Zedillo claimed to have received a majority of 51%.

As stated above, the History of Mexico has not been a peaceful one. After the fall of Porfirio Díaz in 1910, and the Mexican Revolution, there was no stable government until all the military generals united in one political party: the Party of the Mexican Revolution, which later changed its name to the National Party of the Revolution, and later to the Party of the Institutional Revolution, or PRI. In order to avoid chaos, and after 20 years of bloody experience, the now PRI saw it necessary of maintain a heavy military prescence in the country, and found it easy to cheat in elections that way. After the country regained its peace, it did not regain its democracy and the PRI continued to cheat in elections until the year 1994, when Ernesto Zedillo took office and worked hard to improve the freeness and democracy of elections in Mexico. So, the 1997 federal congressional election saw the first opposition Chamber of Deputies ever, and the 2000 elections saw Vicente Fox of a PAN/PVEM alliance become the first oppostion candidate to win an election since 1911.

It is expected that the 2006 elections will also be clean and fair; however, there is uncertainty about whether they will be respected by the more extreme groups in the country, such as hard-line PRI die-hards with a hankering for a past (known as "dinosaurs"). The trade unions, too, mostly remain safely within the PRI's corporativist structure, and have continued during this sexenio to block federal highways and government facilities to blackmail the government into giving them the paternalistic privileges with which the PRI always bought them off. (Documented in Enrique Krauze's Analysis of the Corporative System).

Presidential powers

Prior to the democratization of the country, the revolutionary president held absolute power over the country. He designated the president of the party (PRI), and the PRI designated every single deputy and senator in Congress, and also every single state governor, and every single mayor for all cities and municipalities. Congress gets to choose the Supreme Court judges. As a result, the president's power over the country was complete and unquestionable.

In elementary school, however, children were taught that the president held 70% of all power.

With the democratic reforms of recent years, the constitution is now respected and the president only holds limited powers and rights that include the following:

• Supreme executive power to run and administer the country.
• The right to appoint the attorney general
• The right to appoint the secretary of state for foreign affairs and every ambassador
• Supreme power over the army, navy, and air force
• The power to declare war and peace
• The power of negotiating foreign treaties
• The power to issue decrees
• The right to nominate Supreme Court justices
• The power to veto laws (however, as learned with the controversial 2004 budget, not the power to veto decrees from Congress).

In an effort to destroy the PAN's political power, the PRI-controlled congress has issued irresponsible, deficitary budgets since the year 2000. However, the Fox administration has been pushing for what it calls a "responsible federal tax reform" that will simplify the Mexican government's finances and the way Mexicans do business. The president failed in this effort for three consecutive years. In 2004, the President called for congressmen, governors, mayors, regular citizens, academics, and businessmen to propose a unanimously agreed reform law. It was believed that unanimity would guarantee approval in congress. However, congress decided to ignore it, and passed a budget that the executive again deemed irresponsible. When the president threatened to veto the budget, it was soon learned that no branch of government had the power to veto a decree issued by another branch of government.

Presidential Residence

The President's principal workplace and official residence is Los Pinos located inside the Bosque de Chapultepec (Chapultepec Park). The President has the right to use this residence for the six-year term of office.

Succession

Article 84 of the Mexican Constitution states that "in case of absolute absence of a President" any of the following should happen:

• If the absence (death, impeachment, etc.) should occur in the first two years of the term, Congress will decide who is to be Acting President until elections can be held. Congress should also call for elections in no less than 14 months and no more than 18 months after the absence of the President.
• If the absence should occur in the last four years of the term, Congress will select the Acting President, who will become President of the United Mexican States until the end of the term.
  

  Former Presidents

Contrary to what happens in other countries, former presidents do not continue to be important national figures. Some, like Carlos Salinas de Gortari, have become demons in the eyes of the Mexican public. Ernesto Zedillo holds important offices in the United Nations
and in the private sector, but outside of Mexico, for he lives in a self-imposed exile, as many believe he is hated by many inside the PRI for allowing democracy to exist in Mexico.

List of Presidents of Mexico

''See: List of Presidents of Mexico