Mexico's Null Vote Drive: Practical Politics or Flight from Politics?

Mexico's Null Vote Drive: Practical Politics or Flight from Politics?

Mexico's congressional elections will be next month. Yet, apparently some Mexicans will not be going to the polls in order to express disdain with the entire political class. See the story below:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/06/16/mexico-to-take-to-the-polls-but-not-to-vote/

The French had a similar null voting campaign a bunch of years back. Is the campaign worthwhile in terms of practical politics, or rather a flight from politics and Mexico's nascent democracy? It is unclear that the null voting campaign will catch popular fire in Mexico. Polls indicate that it has not yet captured the popular imagination of Mexicans. Moreover, if one is upset with all political parties and politicians, is the creation of new movements and parties not a good step in order to re-animate democratic political life? It was only in 2000 that Mexico's centre-left (sometimes centre-right) Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) finally lost its grip on political power after more than 70 years to the Christian Democratic National Action Party (PAN) under Vicente Fox. The current President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, also belongs to PAN. This democratic turn has given Mexico more choices and opened the political landscape to rightists, leftists, Greens, and null voters. A null vote might tell all politicians that they are all crooks, but it does not tell them whom they might want in power, or the type of political society they might wish to create.

Tamir Bar-On