Mexico’s Hand Is to the Fire : Salinas Must Accommodate a Surprising Surge From the Left

For all the confusion surrounding the results of last week’s election, there are some obvious conclusions, suggesting a way to settle the apparent impasse between Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Cuauhetemoc Cardenas.

The first lesson to emerge from the July 6 vote is, clearly, the Cardenas surprise. For the last few years, the perception in Mexico has been that the strongest pressures for a liberalization of the political system were coming from the right--in the north, in the National Action Party (PAN), the business community and the United States. In the United States and in some circles here, many believed that a democratization of Mexican political life would bring a shift to the right. And that would bring better--more “mature”--relations with the United States, moving Mexico away from its traditional, perhaps obsolete, “chip on the shoulder” nationalism.

The Cardenas phenomenon disproved both halves of that supposition. Without a doubt, the great beneficiary of last Wednesday’s presidential and congressional elections and of the unquestionable opening of the political system has been the traditional, nationalistic, progressive strain in Mexican society, which is usually viewed as the left of the political Establishment, or the center-left of the national political spectrum. Cardenas, the candidate of a four-party coalition, has shown the country and the world that greater democracy in Mexico may well mean a shift to the left, not to the right. The right may have sown the seeds of change, but the left has reaped the greater part of the harvest.

The millions of Mexicans who voted for Cardenas do not necessarily favor each and every item on his platform. But they have demonstrated that there is a great deal of support for tougher, more nationalistic/progressive stands on such issues as the nation’s foreign debt, the opening of its economy to foreign trade and investment, and its policy toward Central America. It will be difficult for Mexico’s next president not to take this into account. Secondly, the surprisingly low turnout, in relation to previous elections and to the size of the electorate, casts a devastating shadow on the country’s electoral history. Whatever their disagreements on how the vote was distributed among them, the three major candidates (including Manuel Clouthier, of the PAN) seem to accept that no more than roughly 18 million voters went to the polls--less than half the formally registered electorate of 38 million and less than the number of people who voted in 1982, when Mexico’s voting-age population was nearly 20% smaller than it is today. The approximately 10 million votes allotted by the Electoral Commission to Salinas are far fewer than the 17 million votes that Miguel de la Madrid received in 1982, and even fewer than Jose Lopez Portillo had in 1976.

There are only three possible conclusions to draw from this state of affairs:that there was major vote-shaving this time, that the most exciting election in modern Mexican history drew fewer people to the polls than the purely symbolic events of the past, or that the previous elections and the current electoral rolls cannot be taken seriously. Nearly everyone in Mexico is reaching the third conclusion, recognizing that only massive ballot stuffing could have given the two previous presidents the vote totals that they claimed. Similarly, it now appears that opposition complaints about the 1988 electoral rolls were accurate: They were padded by at least 20%.

But the historical conclusions that one can draw from this election are of scant use in devising a way out of the present impasse. Cardenas and Salinas each claims to have won; it seems difficult to believe that the presidency could be wrenched away from Salinas, but it also appears that productive governance may be impossible without the acquiescence of Cardenas. An agreement, however remote or far-fetched it may seem at this point, looks like the only reasonable solution, and the basis for it exists, at least in the abstract. It would involve Cardenas accepting Salinas’ triumph, if the numbers actually support this. But it would also entail the acceptance by the Salinas camp of a major democratic reform in Mexico--no longer as a unilateral, gradual and limited policy but as a major concession to the clamor in the nation as expressed by the vote on July 6.

Such a reform would include changes that are on everybody’s lips in Mexico today. One would be a major overhaul of the media, written and electronic, public and private--particularly the privately owned television chain Televisa--in order to prevent a recurrence of their despicable partisan and authoritarian conduct during the campaign and in the days after the election. Another reform would include a total revamping of the electoral code, which has shown its anti-democratic and bureaucratic nature in ways that few could have imagined. It would also involve an end to what has been called the “corporativist vote” whereby labor unions, peasant associations and entire sections of the federal bureaucracy vote in a bloc in scarcely free and open circumstances. It also would imply an end to the scandalous use, which characterized the 1988 campaign, of federal and state resources by the governing party.

If such a reform were agreed to and carried out in the immediate future, Cardenas would be forsaking the remote chance that he has of taking office this time, in exchange for becoming the man who brought about the true democratization--in all fields, not just electoral--of his country. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, for its part, might well be signing away its electoral future. But it would legitimize its present victory, if the numbers bear it out, and those responsible for such a deal would earn their place in history as the Mexican leaders who finally set the country on the right path toward the 21st Century. That would not be a minor achievement, particularly in view of the available alternatives.