Fwd [GLW}: MEXICO: Ruling party's defeat changes political panorama

["Alan Bradley" <alanb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The following article is from the current issue of Green Left Weekly
(http://www.greenleft.org.au).

MEXICO: Ruling party's defeat changes political panorama
BY PETER GELLERT

MEXICO CITY -- The July 2 presidential elections here have resulted in a
crushing, historical defeat for the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), which has been in power for 71 years. It would be difficult to
underestimate the importance of this development for Mexico's future.

Until the very end, as the initial returns and exit poll results started
coming in, Mexicans had a hard time believing that what was finally at
stake was the dismantling of the "state-party" regime.

The winner was Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola executive and standard bearer of
the conservative National Action Party (PAN), with 42.7% of the vote.
Considerably behind were PRI candidate Francisco Labastida with 35.7% and
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD), with 16.5%.

The PAN also swept the Senate, Chamber of Deputies, and two gubernatorial
races. In Mexico City, the world's largest city and the country's capital,
the PRD's Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor won the mayoral race, while the PRI
came in a distant third with a humiliating 22% of the vote.

Atomic bomb

The results are the political equivalent of an atomic bomb. The PRI has
functioned as a huge patronage machine, based on its umbilical cord to the
powerful presidency. The president, in turn, has been the de facto leader
of the ruling party and chooses his successor.

Through corporatist control of the trade unions and peasant and social
organisations, the "PRI-government" was largely able to control the
organised working class, aided, when necessary, by the repressive forces of
the Mexican state.

Yet Mexicans have become increasingly fed up with the PRI and the entire
corrupt apparatus. The displeasure was fed by the economic crisis of the
mid-1990s, which further impoverished millions of workers and peasants and
massively reduced their purchasing power (today, 42.5% of Mexicans scrape
by on less than two dollars a day), and also by recurring political
assassinations and drug, corruption, and financial scandals.

Fox won because he was viewed as the only candidate able to defeat the PRI.
Indeed, Fox hammered home two themes in the final stretch of the campaign:
the idea of the "useful vote", meaning that a vote for Cardenas and the PRD
would split the opposition and allow the PRI to win with a relative
majority, and that parties alternating in office are the essential factor
in democratising the country.

At the same time, to appeal to younger, urban voters and others fearful of
the PAN's reactionary social program, Fox pledged respect for tolerance,
rejected censorship of the arts, supported secular education and trade
union rights, promised to support the San Andres Peace Accords and
negotiate a peace settlement with the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas even
before taking office on December 1, and declared he would not privatise the
state-run oil industry.

In the last stage of his campaign, he made a major public effort to attract
the left, with the incorporation of some prominent intellectuals as his top
advisers and newspaper ads signed by self-styled leftists, including former
members of the Communist Party urging a vote for the PAN candidate.

Neo-liberal PAN

Yet the PAN is a party with a neo-liberal economic outlook and with
historical ties to the reactionary Catholic clergy. It is not ideologically
based on a nationalist outlook rooted in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17.

PAN governors, while more honest and less corrupt, are no more democratic
or progressive than their PRI predecessors. The strike breaking and
repression of the PAN state government in the local maquiladora industry in
Baja California is one example.

Labastida and President Ernesto Zedillo both recognised Fox's victory --
because the PAN agrees with the PRI on the essence of the neo-liberal
project and had accepted a transition with stability and without major
conflict. Zedillo has offered to collaborate with the president-elect on
all levels between now and when the new administration takes office.

The financial markets reacted positively to the election results, with the
stock market and exchange rate gaining ground.

The contradiction between the PAN's program and outlook and the fact that
electoral support for Fox was based mainly on an anti-PRI vote, rather than
a massive swing to the right by the electorate, will undoubtedly lay the
basis for future social conflicts. For the time being, Fox is bidding his
time, calling for the incorporation of PRI and PRD members in his
administration and declaring that he, and not the PAN, will be governing.

PRI in crisis

Not surprisingly, the election results have thrown the PRI into a major
crisis, with the formation of organised currents. Some have called for the
expulsion of Zedillo, who they allege is responsible for the defeat.

At least three groups are vying for control. Some of the old guard, such as
Puebla Governor Manuel Bartlett, charge the neo-liberal and technocratic
wing of the party with responsibility for the disaster at the polls, by
having led the party to the right.

As the party's financial subsidies and other income from the government
shrinks and the scramble for posts intensifies, the PRI's future may be
bleak.

As a columnist in the left daily La Jornada quipped, the Institutional
Revolutionary Party has long ago ceased to be revolutionary, as of July 2
is no longer institutional, and now is having a hard time remaining as a
party.

For the PRD, the results were disappointing, although Cardenas' vote was in
line with opinion polls. For many it was a bitter irony that it was not the
left, which had struggled for decades for democracy and suffered savage
repression, that was to throw the PRI out of power, but rather the right.

The moderate, electoralist-oriented left, basically organised in and around
the PRD, was simply not able to pose itself as a credible alternative. A
crisis is undoubtedly looming for that party as well.

Yet the PRD had run an issue-oriented campaign on economic policy, Chiapas,
and free public education, and was able to attract huge crowds throughout
the country to its wind-up rallies. Its vote was more conscious and
political and its supporters more easily mobilised in the streets.

The night of the elections Cardenas declared that he would not congratulate
Fox and that the PRD would, from the very start, be in firm opposition. The
party's leadership called on supporters not to accept posts in the new
government and for Mexicans to remain in struggle for a new type of
national project.

If the PRD, now in a weaker position in both houses of congress, is able to
emphasise mass struggles rather than prioritise its electoral ambitions, it
could spur mass struggles with an anti-neoliberal, anti-government thrust.

However, it will be a difficult debate for the PRD, as it seeks to adapt to
the new political situation. Differences within the party tend to take the
form of competing groupings (currently, three) around key personalities,
rather than counterposed political points of view. The search for
scapegoats for the party's defeat at the polls could turn nasty and lead to
prolonged and confused infighting.

At the same time, the leadership of the social movements -- trade unions,
peasant, student, neighbourhood, and women's groups, the majority of the
PRD and the Zapatistas -- have no illusions in the new government. This
could shorten the time frame for a renewal of mass struggles in Mexico,
this time in a vastly different context.