Michael Barone
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
MEXICO CITY–The 2000 election that changes life
most in North America may turn out not to be in the
United States but south of our 2,000-mile border
with Mexico, with its 99 million people. To a visitor
in Mexico, the most obvious sign of political change
is in the campaign posters. In 1994, PRI–the official
party, which has won every election since
1929–painted signs everywhere with the name of
the party's candidate, chosen by the outgoing
president, in big block letters between the red and
green stripes of the Mexican flag. Posters for the
center-right PAN or center-left PRD candidates
were few.
This year PRI billboards show the four
candidates in the party's first-ever primary
November 7 and read: "Tú eliges al candidato"
("You choose the candidate"). Spots run on
Mexico's formerly pro-PRI TV networks for PAN and
PRD as well as PRI candidates; negative ads, never
before seen here, now run, though voters
interviewed in the industrial suburb of Coacalco
found them unnerving.
Under the PRI system invented by Plutarco Calles
in 1929, the campaign was a ritual progress of the
candidate around the country, followed by five years
of total power and a sixth year of bad luck in which
the new candidate was chosen and the old
president disappeared from public life. It was a
system whose calendrical regularity and
undertones of human sacrifice appealed to the
Aztec sensibility that the great writer Octavio Paz
said was a basic part of the Mexican character.
Now the PRI candidate will be chosen in a primary,
not by the incumbent president; so there is no
guarantee who will win the PRI primary or the July
2000 general election.
Performance counts. This new competitive
electoral politics has already started to change the
political landscape and government. No one can
stake a career on the assumption that PRI will
always win. In 1997 elections, PAN and PRD
deprived PRI of its majority in Congress; PAN and
PRD candidates have been elected governor and
mayor. Now voters rate politicians on their
performance in office. In Coacalco, local PAN
officials won their party votes by doing a good job,
while the perception that PRD presidential
candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas did a poor job as
mayor of Mexico City caused him to plunge in the
polls.
PRI candidates have been competing adeptly under
the new rules. Roberto Madrazo, who spent huge
sums to be elected governor of Tabasco in 1994,
started running negative ads last spring, attacking
the PRI establishment, and seized a lead in polls.
Francisco Labastida, the former interior minister,
relying partly on the universally assumed support of
President Ernesto Zedillo and local PRI
apparatchiks, has hired U.S. consultants like
pollster Stan Greenberg and James Carville to help
fashion TV spots that use his record to show he is
honest, dedicated to open elections, and close to
people's problems.
Reporters thought Madrazo's
sharp jabs helped him win a PRI candidates' debate
September 8. But Labastida, who responded with
only deft criticisms, moved ahead in polls in a
country where voters still dread the disorder of
nearly 20 years of violent revolution that preceded
the PRI system. A question remains whether the
primary loser will have a ruptura with PRI. A
confident Labastida has promised he would not;
Madrazo, at the PRI's October 13 platform meeting,
carefully avoided ruling out a separate run. But exit
polls and the government's new independent
electoral commission have dramatically reduced
fraud, and most Mexicans consider the process
fair.
PAN's Vicente Fox, former head of Coca-Cola in
Mexico, has been airing ads for two years telling
how he defied PRI and got results as governor of
Guanajuato. With his cowboy boots and bold
speaking style, Fox has corralled the PAN base.
Now, from a party traditionally pro-business,
pro-United States and pro-Catholic, he has called
for guaranteed education up to university, traveled
to Cuba, and addressed a crowd of 90,000
Protestant evangélicos.
On policy, all parties are
converging on the center. There is little
NAFTA-bashing, and even the leftish Cárdenas has
backed new privatizations. Elections will remain
competitive even if Labastida wins for PRI, as
insiders predict.
But competitive elections will not solve everything.
There has been much stalemate between Zedillo
and the anti-PRI Congress majority; no one is
accustomed to divided government, which seems
sure to continue. The unhappy fact is that Mexico's
centralized government is often ineffective, as
evidenced during last month's floods, when Zedillo
was heckled for his government's unpreparedness.
Levels of honesty among the police and government
generally are abysmal.
More important, there is a danger that as power is
decentralized the country could rip apart. There is
decay of authority already: The crime rate in
Mexico City has doubled since 1994; the Zapatista
rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas is nearly
six years old; students at UNAM, the nation's
largest university, have been on strike for six
months; and the illegal-drug business is still thriving
despite claims of increased U.S.-Mexican
cooperation. "We must break up the existing
monopolies," wrote Octavio Paz in 1969, "and
discover forms, new and truly effective forms, of
democratic and popular control."
Mexico has
started on Paz's path but has a long way to
JWR contributor Michael Barone is a columnist at U.S. News & World Report
and the author of the biennialAlmanac of American Politics. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
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