President Enrique Peña Nieto works to soothe Mexico tensions Several days after taking office in December, Enrique Peña Nieto, president, laid out his strategy for traversing the often hostile terrain of Mexico's political landscape. "Politics and more politics," Mr Peña Nieto told the Financial Times. That's how you work towards the building of agreements. This week, the 46-year-old leader of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party was scrambling to put that approach into action as political tensions threatened to fracture a cross-party alliance that has been the driving force of his economic reform agenda and helped win attention from international investors. On Tuesday, Mr Peña Nieto suspended all public activities relating to the Pact for Mexico, the document of 95 economic, social and political reform proposals that leaders of all the country's leading parties signed on December 2. The reason, the presidential office said, was to "open a space for frank dialogue that strengthens the Pact and allows disagreements to be overcome." In the process, Mr Peña Nieto postponed the presentation of an awaited banking-sector reform that had as its central aim the boosting of Mexico's woefully low levels of credit to the private sector. The crisis came about after members of the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and the conservative National Action Party (PAN), both signatories to the Pact, accused government officials of using social-assistance programmes in the state of Veracruz to their advantage in forthcoming elections. This week, Jesús Zambrano, PRD leader, warned that the Veracruz scandal had placed the future of the reform engine, which in recent months has attracted billions of dollars of foreign-investor funds into Mexico, in the balance. The question is whether Mr Peña Nieto has the political skills to repair the damage. Roy Campos, a pollster in Mexico City, is upbeat about the survival of the Pact and of the administration's economic reform programme. One reason is an ongoing dialogue between the government and the opposition. Indeed, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, Mr Peña Nieto's powerful interior minister, confirmed on Tuesday via his account on Twitter, the microblogging service, that he planned to hold a meeting on Wednesday with the heads of the main political parties. A second reason is Mr Peña Nieto's deliberate response to the crisis after first underestimating the scale of the problem late last week. On Tuesday, Mexico's leader gave a rousing speech in the state of Puebla where he asked all the political parties to join him in helping to ensure that social programmes were protected from the threat of use for political gain. "Let's bulletproof them," he said. Mr Campos believes that Mr Peña Nieto's response allows everyone involved to claim some sort of victory - the opposition parties that they brought the administration to task, and Mr Peña Nieto that he was able to pull in the opposition in a joint crusade against corruption. "Peña Nieto has recovered very quickly," says Mr Campos. The pact is far from broken. Indeed, some Mexico watchers even believe that the incident could strengthen the Pact by showing that it is serving its purpose in forcing greater transparency and accountability, and by binding parties to the pledges it contains. Yet even if Mr Peña Nieto does emerge unscathed from this week's drama, it seems clear that Veracruz at the very least serves as a reminder of how carefully he must tread. Despite considerable dynamism on the reform agenda so far, commentators say there is no guarantee that that will count for much when it comes to debating the forthcoming tax and energy proposals - two highly divisive issues. There also remains the fact that Mexico's opposition parties have a plethora of internal problems, and their leaders, who are signatories of the Pact, by no means speak for all party members. Given those dual challenges, Mr Peña Nieto is going to need every ounce of the politics and more politics that he talked about in December.