HE ONLY took office on December 1st, but Mexico’s new president is setting a furious pace. Having laid out sweeping changes to education and set up a new anti-corruption commission, Enrique Peña Nieto went on to unveil potentially far-reaching reforms of public security. He has thus taken aim at two of the country’s most notorious de facto powers: organised crime, and the mighty teachers’ union.

His predecessor, Felipe Calderón, began by declaring war on drug mafias, calling out the army to restore order. The murder rate doubled in five years, though the gangs were weakened. Mr Peña, who has promised to halve the murder rate by 2018, is taking a different approach.

A law approved on December 13th centralises responsibility for public security in a much-strengthened interior ministry. This will include a new paramilitary gendarmerie, mainly of retrained soldiers and initially numbering 10,000. They will be sent to the most dangerous areas. The federal police, greatly expanded by Mr Calderón, will focus on investigating crime. That is sorely needed: only 8% of crimes are reported; of those, only 15% are solved. The plan is to divide the country into five regions for security purposes. The president emphasised the importance of co-operation between the centre and the 31 states. Publicly at least, the state governors murmured approval of the new plan.

Preventing the flow of drugs to the United States will take a back seat. Mr Peña’s only mention of narcotics was a rehabilitation programme for Mexican addicts. Miguel Ángel Osorio, the interior minister, said that the previous government’s focus on capturing or killing senior drug barons had “provoked a process of fragmentation of [criminal] groups…which makes them more violent and much more dangerous.” Instead, 15 specialised police units will deal with kidnapping and extortion, the crimes—along with murder—the public fear most, and a new task-force will track down missing persons with the help of biometric databases.

The second big battle Mr Peña has begun is to improve Mexico’s schools. They are the worst in the OECD, a group of mainly rich countries; in some subjects, Mexican pupils lag behind their peers in Romania and Thailand. Part of the reason is that most of the country’s education budget goes to the teachers’ union to divide among its members. The process is so opaque that no one even knows how many teachers there are. Elba Esther Gordillo, the union’s Chanel-clad leader, has used the votes of her 1.4m members to block reforms.

Mr Peña proposes to prise some power from her manicured fists. A bill sent to Congress on December 11th would restore control over teachers’ pay and hiring to the education ministry, and set up an independent agency to assess their performance. The Citizens’ Coalition for Education, an alliance of civil organisations, compares the proposal to the celebrated arrest by Carlos Salinas, early in his presidency, of a corrupt oil-union boss in 1989.

Mr Peña will be judged in education, as in security, not by his plans but by his success in implementing them. The teachers’ union has a history of backing reforms only to sabotage them. Even Ms Gordillo’s fall would not fix education overnight. The arrest of the oil-union leader hardly solved Mexico’s energy problems. Indeed, 24 years on, an oil reform is one of the new government’s most anxiously awaited bills. That is due in 2013, along with a fiscal reform intended to reduce the government’s dependence on Pemex, the wheezing public oil and gas monopoly. The pacey Mr Peña cannot afford to slow down.