Putting the brakes on change

THERE were two main losers in last Sunday's mid-term elections in Mexico. The first was President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN). The second was democracy itself: only 41% of voters bothered to turn out to choose the lower house of Congress, a disappointing figure for a country that has staked so much hope on its transition to a pluralist democracy. But if it was a bad—and perhaps fatal—result for Mr Fox's government and its stalled agenda of reforms, neither was it an especially good one for any of the opposition parties.