Muscle on the Left in Mexico : Opposition’s Unforeseen Popularity Shows Scope of Voter Unrest

As the Mexican election campaign enters its final month, a number of unforeseen events are making it the most interesting race since 1940 and one that could leave a major mark on Mexico’s future.

The emergence of a strong left-wing challenge to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), combined with a public commitment by the PRI candidate to a clean election, has made the July 6 vote increasingly unpredictable and significant. The tensions arising from the growth of the left and from Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s opposition to traditional electoral fraud can either change the Mexican political landscape or lead to an ungovernable situation, particularly in view of Mexico’s economic crisis.

The campaign’s major surprise has been the success of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the revered late president, Lazaro Cardenas. At first he was viewed as a somewhat quixotic, old-fashioned nationalist who had been campaigning more on the strength of his father’s name than on the force of his own personality and attraction. But his challenge to the PRI has been well-received, demonstrating that the growing discontent in Mexico can be channeled to the left of the political spectrum, not only to the right and the National Action Party (PAN), as had been the case in the recent past. Cardenas is showing that there is still a large and vocal constituency in Mexico in support of traditional nationalism, populism and state-oriented economic policies, whatever their actual viability might be.

Cardenas’ campaign picked up steam in April, when a number of polls showed that he had overtaken PAN candidate Manuel Clouthier in the contest for second place (after Salinas). Then, on May 26, he held a monumental rally at the Mexico City campus of the National Autonomous University; more than 50,000 students extended him a welcome of the sort that no Mexican politician has received at the university in many decades. Last weekend he got a major boost when the other important left-wing candidate, Heberto Castillo of the Mexican Socialist Party, withdrew from the race, throwing his support to Cardenas.

The importance of this gesture goes beyond the scant 2% or 3% of the vote that most polls had predicted for Castillo. In a country where the left has been both weak and divided for nearly half a century, any unification must be read as a symptom of strength. More important, the Socialist Party’s backing will be of significant help if the Cardenas campaign has to combat electoral fraud on July 6. The Socialist Party, although electorally marginal, has far more experience and resources for supervising the voting process at the 70,000 polling booths than have the other parties that are supporting Cardenas. If the trends in favor of Cardenas continue, he may well come in ahead of Clouthier, and not far behind Salinas, in several major cities and certain states, though not on a national scale.

The problem lies as always in the possibility of widespread fraud in favor of the PRI candidates, presidential and congressional. The issue is not whether Salinas wants a clean election; he has said so, and clearly he is aware that the domestic and foreign perception of a seriously marred vote would weaken and perhaps destroy his hopes of modernizing the country. The question is whether he can translate his good intentions into numbers on election day--or whether the political system’s inertia will make it impossible for anything resembling an honest election to take place. The signs are not necessarily encouraging. PRI chairman Jorge de la Vega Dominguez has boasted that Salinas will win with “around 20 million votes”--nearly twice as many as were cast for PRI candidates in 1985, and more than twice the tally expected for Cardenas and Clouthier together.

There is no easy, cost-free solution to the electoral dilemma that Salinas and the PRI find themselves in today. Letting the chips fall where they may would not endanger Salinas’ election, but it could entail serious losses for the PRI in the House and Senate. It also could create dangerous precedents for PRI rule in the future, and could seriously undermine the party’s claim of representing an overwhelming majority of the Mexican people. But it would be even riskier to try to maintain the padded electoral majorities of the past in the face of a significantly strengthened opposition on both the left and the right. Fraud could be kept from view in the countryside, where it most often takes place, but it would be obvious in the national results if the numbers did not correspond to the impressions and perceptions that emerged during the campaign. There are simply too many people watching, both in Mexico and abroad, for major fraud to occur without detection and denunciation.

Mexico is approaching a key moment in its efforts to jettison a political system that served its purpose and that has now outlived its usefulness. It can emerge from the coming election intact and stronger as a nation or be weakened by fraud and the ensuing dissent, protest and anger. One thing is fairly certain: It will not be the same. In a country where change comes slowly and imperceptibly, if at all, that in itself is a major transformation.