In India, voters showed displeasure with the ruling party and its hitherto invincible leader. In Mexico, there was no voter revolt, but as in India and South Africa (see June 6’s piece), there is still much to do to satisfy a restless and skeptical electorate.
India
Narendra Modi, India’s dominant, all-powerful, and seemingly popular prime minister, expected to lead his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a smashing victory in India six-week long parliamentary electoral exercise. He confidently anticipated winning more than 400 seats in the giant 543-seat Lok Sabha (parliament). Instead, the BJP won only 240 seats, down from its 303 seats in 2019. Modi himself won his own parliamentary place in Varanasi by a surprisingly thin margin, compared to 2019.
Modi was nevertheless installed yesterday as prime minister, for the third time. But he and his BJP colleagues have for the first time been compelled to rely on coalition partners to form the government. South Africa, which seems headed toward a supposed Government of National Unity, embracing several parties and not just one or two to provide a working majority, is in even more tenuous or dire collaboration straits. But, unlike South Africa, Modi’s India never anticipated being compelled to share.
To Modi’s immense chagrin and to the surprise of opinion pollsters and most commentators, voters indicated that they were tired (or resented) his many anti-democratic maneuvers, were worried about his attacks on the country’s peaceable 200-million Muslims, and had had more than enough of his attempts to establish a large-scale Modi personality cult.
Modi’s political and quasi-religious emphasis on Hindutva—Hinduness and Hindu chauvinism as the foundation-stone of a once secular India – was rebuffed to at least some extent by an electorate that is about 80 percent Hindi speaking.
To become prime minister, Modi had to obtain the backing of a regional party in Bihar State (in the east) and another in southern Andhra Pradesh State. Their support gave Modi’s alliance 293 seats against the Congress Party- led opposition alliance’s surprisingly strong 232 seat result. The magic number was 272, just over half of the places in parliament.
The BJP won no seats in Tamil Nadu state in the south, possibly a reaction against Modi’s pronounced partiality for the Hindi-speaking, poorer, and less educated northern parts of the nation. But even in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the north, the BJP polled poorly, losing half of the seats it won in 2019. It did equally badly in Maharashtra, the important state that surrounds Mumbai, India’s commercial capital.
The BJP gained in Odisha State in the east, but suffered losses in neighboring West Bengal, which is wealthier and includes the major city of Kolkata.
According to one Indian columnist, “it was if someone snapped their fingers and India emerged from a long period of [Modi-induced] hypnosis.” Certainly, to the surprise of many (me included) the world’s largest democracy showed that democracy still had meaning. Voters discerned arrogance and pretension and cast their millions of ballots for something closer to what they had known before Modi burst charmingly and invidiously onto the national political scene in 2014.
Modi’s ten years in power have enriched India’s economic performance, attracted numerous multinational investors (some of whom have fled China), improved the country’s creaky infrastructure, and facilitated the making of new Indian billionaires. The state also established innovative new ways of redistributing income to India’s millions of impoverished citizens.
The BJP regime has also used the regulatory raj to hinder opposition political parties, especially the Aam Aadmi party that has tried to run Delhi State, frozen opposition bank accounts, and harassed critics with endless largely spurious criminal investigations. It censors broadly, controls much of the media directly or through proxies, and bans journalistic outlets who dare to criticize Modi. Overseas, his regime assassinated adherents of Khalistan, a Sikh state to be carved out of the Punjab.
Modi claimed recently that he had been sent by God to save India. According to Modi, his birth was not a “biological” event; he had been created by God. Some at least of India’s millions of voters seem not to have been impressed.
An Indian political scientist wrote scathingly in the Indian Express last week that “what people saw in this campaign was not a leader, but an increasingly self-aggrandizing figure, a prisoner of his own delusions of divinity.”
. The world’s largest democracy has survived slippage into authoritarianism. Perhaps the Indian result provides a symbolic check on the ambitions of wannabe autocrats everywhere. But the BJP and Modi may not acknowledge their electorate’s seeming disdain for personalized autocracy. And more pompous would-be tyrants may not even notice.
Mexico
In stark contrast, the ruling Morena Party triumphed soundly in Mexico despite cascading drug-gang perpetrated killings, rampant crime, and the ceaseless passage of immigrants from across the world en route to asylum in the U.S. Potable water is scarce and renewable energy more an aspiration than anything real.
Mexico’s bloodlands consume 30,000 murdered lives every year. Gangs are even attacking rivals with drones, causing even more brutal displacements and more daily insecurity than ever before. The cartels have even expanded from narcotics trafficking into people smuggling, widespread extortion, control over the crossing of migrants into the U.S., and more. The gangs have shifted recently, too, into the manufacture of fentanyl, using basic components imported from China. Their profits are immense, and insecurity and danger are consequently rife across the country.
Out-going President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) sponsored his unlikely protégé, the mayor of Mexico City, and she will take office in September as his successor. AMLO as he is known, is immensely popular despite his mostly hands-off approach to the narcotics cartels that shoot up their rivals and innocent Mexicans alike. AMLO has done little to counter rampant corruption, strengthen policing, improve schooling, and reduce inequality. Yet he sold the former president’s official aircraft and largely avoids ostentation. He boosted pensions for the poor. But it is difficult to claim that his six-year presidency has done much for most Mexicans. Moreover, he has boosted support for fossil fuels, especially shoring up Pemex, the inefficient state petroleum exploiter and producer. His vaunted new train route across Yucatan is a money loser, too.
Whether Claudia Sheinbaum, who ran Mexico City tolerably well, can be transformative in a manner that AMLO is not is the big question. She would need to break with his policies, reform Pemex, and find some successful way (perhaps copying the methods of El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele?) to take power away from the drug cartels.
She needs to go after the most vicious cartel operatives in order to stem rising homicide rates. She needs to battle the extortion rackets that impoverish Mexican workers and harm business enterprises. She needs to invent a way to keep kids in school and away from cartel recruiters. She needs to show Mexicans that she can lead them to work well, and prosperously, with both Washington and Beijing. But, most of all, she needs to indicate that her party’s massive victory at the polls will not give autocratic powers to the presidency; AMLO has proposed such changes. Sheinbaum should reject such an initiative.
If those initiatives are on her agenda as a former professor and technocrat, with impressive climate change credentials, she has kept them hidden. She also lacks AMLO’s evident charisma. But she may have the integrity and initiative that he refused to deploy to save Mexico from itself. There is much to do, and too little time to reform Mexico’s repeated failure to deliver meaningful political goods to its long-neglected citizens.
PS — For commentary on the European elections, and on France’s decision hold a snap parliamentary contest, I suggest you consult my distinguished colleague David Andelman’s Substack Newsletter.