But the map of impacts is different, considering that the business community is not monolithic; what for some businessmen is the end, for others means a simple political vendetta. The generalities, in this story, can fall into error.
For large companies, national and foreign, yesterday’s meeting was an eminently political act, although there is one element that worries them: the attacks against the INE, before, during and after the mandate revocation consultation. Under the glass of the private sector, the blows to the electoral referee undermine the democracy that has been built in recent decades, feed a bad image of the country, contribute to uncertainty, question the rule of law and, with it, inhibit investments.
Having said the above, and although the business representations will not publicly acknowledge it, a large part of the large companies do not harbor good expectations. Quite the contrary. For many of them comes more radicalization, more polarization.
The investment funds maintain the same diagnosis and, like the large companies, consider that the revocation did not cause the turning point; the alert was generated before, with the changes that are intended to be imposed on the electricity market.
#In Photos l The contrasts of the electoral day of mandate revocation
Mexico holds referendum on whether President Lopez Obrador should continue in office
A woman prepares quedasillas next to a box located in the Guerrero neighborhood of Mexico City.
Gustavo Graf/REUTERS
Mexico holds referendum on whether President Lopez Obrador should continue in office
A line of people waiting to cast their vote in Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City.
Gustavo Graf/REUTERS
MEXICO-POLITICS-REFERENDUM-VOTE
This is what a box looked like in Chimalhuacán.
Pedro Pardo/AFP
Mexico holds referendum on whether President Lopez Obrador should continue in office
An elderly woman is helped by her son to cast her vote in a ballot box.
Gustavo Graf/REUTERS
MEXICO-POLITICS-REFERENDUM-VOTE
Empty box in Mexico City.
Rodrigo Arangua/AFP
MEXICO-POLITICS-REFERENDUM-VOTE
A Tsotsil woman is going to vote this Palm Sunday, in San JuanChamula, Chiapas.
Isaac Guzman/AFP
For investors, Mexico still has the drivers that attract capital: a phenomenal, privileged geographic location, a young, hard-working population, increasingly more qualified. But it also has something pernicious: volatility in its regulatory policies. ‘Small detail’, when the capital goes where it has better conditions.
Thus, for investment funds (and also for the rest of the business community), there is no economy that can be sustained without electricity, even with all its attributes; If there is no certainty of a country’s energy capacity, it is not possible to guarantee its growth and, therefore, there are no incentives to invest. It’s that simple.
This does not mean the end either. Right now, investors aren’t contemplating extreme measures. Leaving the country is not in his strategy, but exploring other markets is.
What is very clear is that there will be sectors in which there will be no investments; In energy, obviously, there will not be a penny of investment until we wait for better conditions. The rules are changing and, consequently, private investment is not going to be there.
For the entrepreneurial ecosystem, the panorama is somewhat different, because something distinguishes them from the business elite: they do not seek rent, they do not tie their businesses to public concessions. Thus, for example, 2021 was a historic year for entrepreneurship in terms of raising capital, raising around 4,000 million dollars, which were invested in dozens of companies, several of them unicorns today.
Therefore, while in the upper echelons of the private sector there is concern about the situation, Mexico is becoming a relevant Latin American market for entrepreneurial capital. The global capital market observes that in Mexico there are global entrepreneurs, who are not only aspiring to a local exit but are also seeking transcendence of their businesses at a global level.
In other words, Mexico was discovered for the global market as a country that can generate large-scale, high-impact ventures. That had never happened in history.
Entrepreneurs would have a different panorama, beyond the politics. Although the focus to be addressed could be elsewhere: for some time now, the venture has overheated in terms of valuations and has registered brutal injections of money, which can generate distortions and adjustments at the time.