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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters PRI outfoxed at last
By Hisham El-Naggar
"Change" was the word most often heard as Mexico went to the polls this week to elect a new president. And, it did spell bad news for ruling-party candidate Francisco Labastida. Early results showed conclusively that a coalition of the opposition right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and the Mexican Green Party won both the presidential and parliamentary elections, by all accounts the cleanest in Mexico's often troubled political history. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has enjoyed an uninterrupted hold on power for the past 71 years, also lost in both houses of the Mexican Congress. One of the amazing things about this versatile country of 130 million people is that under current President Ernesto Zedillo, the PRI has been able to re-cast itself as the party of change. But it appears that the PRI's fast changing face was not good enough for the country's 60 million voters.
Designated through what Mexicans colourfully call the dedazo -- the pointed finger of the outgoing president -- Zedillo succeeded President Carlos Salinas in 1994. Such anti-democratic practice, not to mention a historically none-too-transparent electoral process, has been characteristic of PRI rule, making Mexican elections arguably the most boring in Latin America.
Well, almost. In the past two elections, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of a former PRI president and rather more anti-American than most, staged a credible challenge to the PRI by running as an opposition candidate and uniting behind him the forces of the left -- not to be scoffed at in a country that underwent an epoch-making revolution in 1910. What is more, it is widely believed that he would have actually won were it not for the PRI's very inventive "electoral engineering."
Having felt the heat of a feisty opposition, the two candidates who did make it to the presidency have wrought a remarkable transformation in Mexican politics. Carlos Salinas moved the once left-leaning, supposedly socialist PRI decidedly to the right, initiating the familiar privatisation cycle that resulted in a not-very-socialist redistribution of wealth -- toward the top. Zedillo, whose six-year term began inauspiciously with a botched devaluation, felt compelled to break the golden rule of Mexican politics by actually investigating his predecessor. And just to make sure no one missed the point, he jailed Salinas's brother on suspicion of being party to a murder conspiracy.
"This was not a truncheon of victory for democracy but a permanent committment," declared former United States President Jimmy Carter who led an international observer team during the Mexican elections.
An election campaign poster of President-elect Vicente Fox's party PAN and a Mexican soldier patrolling a street in a village in Mexico's troubled Chiapas province where indigenous people took up arms against the government which in turn harshly quelled the uprising
(photo:AFP)
After this, ground-breaking reforms of the political system became inevitable. Zedillo democratised the PRI's electoral machine by staging the first-ever primary to select Francisco Labastida as PRI's presidential candidate. His efforts in cleaning up the voting process were unparalleled, complete with comptrollers representing all parties in all polling stations and some 860 foreign observers all over the place. So it's not surprising that when Labastida spoke of "a new Mexico", he was taken quite seriously.
Zedillo's feat of transparency was PRI's undoing. The fact that people genuinely believed that a vote cast for the opposition could bring PRI's rule to an end suggested that the challenge he faced was serious indeed -- and radically different from the one faced by his two predecessors.
Yes, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) ran again. But most opinion polls before the election -- admittedly none too reliable in Mexico -- suggested that his popularity among voters had waned. This was probably the result of his choice not to contest his opponents' victories in the two previous elections, even though many believed them to be fraudulent. Why vote for Cardenas, his former supporters asked, if he didn't have the stomach to carry the fight against PRI to the limit -- that is, to the streets if necessary?
The rival Labastida rightly feared most was Vicente Fox, the candidate of the PAN. Riding high on a well-financed campaign, Fox has succeeded in portraying himself as the most credible alternative to the PRI, the candidate who can successfully lead Mexico into the post-PRI era. The PRI grumbles that some of the money came from north of the border, from Republican politicians to be precise, but perhaps what was really on trial in this election was change for the sake of change.
Fox was hoping that even leftist critics of the PRI would vote for him, reasoning that it was either him or business as usual. He did succeed in winning over a couple of highly visible intellectuals formerly wedded to radical politics, but that was the extent of his success in wooing the left. Polls directly before voting on Sunday showed Fox stuck in a plateau with 40 per cent of projected votes, a trifle below Labastida's 42 per cent. The remaining 18 per cent or so represented the hardcore left, and they seemed unconcerned by Fox's protest that to vote for Cardenas would be "wasting their vote."
But what kind of change does Fox represent? Fox belongs to the same political elite as the PRI. He won his party's primary in a manner that hardly suggested a deep love affair with democracy; a move that alienated some former supporters. His brother has been accused of benefiting from a multibillion "bank rescue" operation launched by the very PRI he sought to oust -- paid for, of course, by Mexican voters.
There is also the fact that PAN candidates who have won local elections and became governors of various Mexican states have adopted retrograde legislation, suggesting a shameless flirtation with the most reactionary faction of the Catholic Church. Fox himself does not appear to be immune from the authoritarian streak so common to the self-righteous right -- his detractors have gone so far as to call him fascist. Such an epithet could be dismissed as mere sloganeering were it not for the fact that there is a strong progressive, not to mention anti-clerical, faction in Mexico.
Beyond this irritant not many expect Fox to depart from the mostly market-oriented, more or less pro-American policies that the "new" PRI has made its own; if anything, a conservative like Fox is likely to embrace such policies more fervently. Worse, he might be tempted to have a go at privatising PEMEX, the state-owned oil company and a sacred cow if ever there was one. For many older Mexicans, some of whom donated jewellery, pots, pans and even chickens to help fund the PRI's nationalisation of the giant company, privatising would hardly be a welcome change.
As Mexicans went to the polls on Sunday, the election looked like a cliff-hanger, a "Mexican standoff," as some wits have predictably called it. That a PRI candidate was not sure to win this time around is quite a change indeed. And, of course, there is something to be said for the refreshing candour with which Labastida declared: "We'll show them we can win without cheating!" Alas, he lost. And, Fox won.
