The New Mexico: A Multi-Party State Emerges From Ashes of Sanctified Rule

On a rainy Friday a couple of weeks ago, Felix Salgado Macedonio, the candidate of the left opposition National Democratic Front (FDN) from the 2nd Congressional District of Guerrero state, walked up to the presidium of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies with two coarse sacks over his shoulder. He then calmly emptied the contents of the sacks on the smooth green rug in front of the presidential dais--thousands of ballots cast in his favor and then burned or half-burned to deprive him of his victory and give it to the official candidate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).

By emptying his sacks, Salgado threw a handful of volcanic dust in the face of traditional Mexican politics. His Ash Friday ceremony worked. The Electoral College reversed the official result, gave Salgado his rightful seat and consoled his PRI opponent by making him a proportional party representative.

In the past two months, Mexico has undergone a greater political change than at any time in the past two decades. What has changed? Salgado and his dramatic victory illustrate the fact that the 59-year PRI stranglehold over political life has ended. The results of the July elections left the PRI with only a slim majority in the newly constituted Congress. Executive initiatives will have to pass minute examination and protracted debate in both chambers. Horse-trading, tactical alliances, compromise will become normal events. For the first time, opposition candidates have been elected to the Senate. It is a question of time before the upper house admits proportional representation. The Mexican Congress has ceased to be a rubber-stamp institution.

So what has changed in Mexico? The Congress has more power, the president less. The executive will now be subject to a system of checks and balances. This is a tremendous change in a country where the presidential institution has been given a quasi-sacred status. The president of Mexico has derived his authority from overwhelming, at times fraudulent, PRI victories; but also from more intangible, symbolic traditions reflecting Mexico’s pre-Columbian and Iberian political sources. The Aztec emperor was given the title of Tlatoani, He of the Great Voice, and the Spanish monarch ruled under divine right. Their subjects were not only profane, but expected to remain silent.

As of Sept. 1, when outgoing President Miguel de la Madrid was frequently interrupted and heckled by the opposition as he delivered his State of the Union message, the Mexican presidency has been desanctified. What was wrong is expressed in the old joke in which Porfirio Diaz, for 30 years president and dictator until the 1910 Revolution overthrew him, asks a politician, “What time is it?” and the obsequious underling replies, “Any time you say, Mr. President.” In this new Mexico, presidents and their cabinet ministers will be strongly questioned by Congress and expected to answer.

All of this is politics as usual in Western Europe, Japan or the United States. But it is politics extraordinario in Mexico. A virtual one-party system has been succeeded by an effective multiparty system, closer to Latin European models (Spain, France, Italy), with their wide ideological spectrum, than to the North American two-party system, with its extremely narrow ideological choice. To the right of the PRI stands the PAN (National Action Party), the traditional and well-rooted party of the conservative Catholic middle class. To its left, the FDN and its electoral alliance going from Marxist to social-democratic tendencies. The PRI has really become a party--a part instead of the whole; a participant in politics rather than a synthesis of national politics.

Why did things change? The reason is twofold. A successful system, in comparative Latin American terms, offered political stability and economic growth in exchange for almost unlimited power. No military coups, no unmovable personal dictatorships, but rather a flexible, formally renewable system under the roof of the so-called “revolutionary family,” heirs to the 1910-1940 revolution of Francisco I. Madero, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Lazaro Cardenas; add to this at least 40 years of sustained, spectacular growth at the annual rate of 6%. When economic crisis put an end to expansion in 1982, the compact was broken and the other, deeper reason for change emerged. This was the appearance of new, modern social forces at all levels of Mexican society: middle class, bureaucrats, technocrats, businessmen, workers, rural associations, students, intellectuals,women and a young, renewed group of army officers and clergy.

This new society was not determined from above. It came from below, as a result of education and economic and social betterment. And it did not radiate from the all-powerful center, Mexico City, and the all-powerful head, the president. It moved from the local, state and municipal levels. All of this came together during the De la Madrid years of crushing foreign debt and sharp decline in living standards.

The PRI offered reform from within when it could no longer sustain its accustomed levels of patronage. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the former PRI governor of Michoacan state and son of the last revolutionary, Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940), took the party at its word. He launched a movement for democratic reform within the PRI and ended up expelled from the party. It was a grievous mistake, from the PRI’s point of view. Where was the party’s vaunted talent for negotiation?

These events united the traditionally divided left under the Cardenista banner. As the campaign grew, so did expectations for a large share of the vote. The official results, even if contested by the left itself, are surprising. Cardenas won nearly a third of the vote, carried five states and wrested the capital, Mexico City--where a fifth of the nation’s people live and where more than half of its economic activity is concentrated--from the now-limping PRI.

Perhaps the pro-Cardenas vote was more anti-PRI than pro-left. But two paramount facts remain. The first is that there is a new political choice in Mexico. This choice has a name: Change. Its breadth is impressive. The mandate for change emerging from the election affects almost all things and all people in Mexico, but, most especially, it compromises the parties themselves, old and new, official and opposition.

PRI, the official party, will have to change simply because the voter now has two options--to the left and the right. The PRI will have to change because the voters can now change, too, and go elsewhere. In these circumstances, the worst thing the PRI could do is revive its fraudulent practices. People will not take it.

But if the PRI has to change, so do the opposition parties, notably the left FDN coalition. It cannot continue to cash in on discontent with the PRI and the government forever. Its challenge is to move quickly from being a merely electoral front of miniparties to becoming a true party of the Mexican left, capable of effectively challenging the PRI in the coming state elections this year, in the congressional elections three years hence and in the presidential election of 1994.

Speaking recently with Cardenas, the FDN candidate, I found a man relaxed and confident, strong in his decision to fight to the limit against fraud and electoral illegitimacy, but equally clear in his intention to survive the current electoral debate and form a permanent political movement. He has been accused, untruthfully, of being a captive of nostalgia for the 1930 reforms headed by his father. In his words, a forward-looking truly progressive ideology takes the high ground. Cardenas is as worried as Fidel Castro or Henry Kissinger (or as George Bush and Michael S. Dukakis should be) about the disruptive effects of the debt burden on the Mexican political, economic and social fabric. He asks, as do U.S. Sens. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), for a renegotiation of the debt, a more equal distribution of responsibilities and a show of political will needed to reach consensus between all parties--debtor and creditor governments and the banks themselves.

Cardenas sees the renewal of growth as the sine qua non of a stable, democratic Mexico. In this, he hardly differs from the PRI candidate, former Budget and Planning Minister Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Salinas, in talks with me, stressed his message of economic and political modernization. He counts on support from Mexico’s forward-looking, modern productive forces, notably a new, growing and young entrepreneurial class, capable of competing internationally, and a young, emerging working-class leadership in a country of nearly 90 million people, 50% of them 15 years of age or younger, creating a need for 1 million new jobs each year.

If Salinas--whom I also found calm, confident and adamant in respecting the growth and the rights of the opposition--is declared president by Congress in the next few days or weeks, his good intentions will promptly be tested on two fronts. He will be challenged by the so-called “dinosaurs” of the PRI, who believe that by making democratic concessions the party is giving up power piecemeal. His reformism might also be halted by the “blackboard boys,” who chalk up solutions learned at Stanford or the London School of Economics; if reality denies what the blackboard says, then the blackboard is still right.

As president, Salinas would face a country different from the conceptions of both prehistoric dinosaurs and blackboard wizards. He will also face an entrenched bureaucracy and an arrogant, monied upper class, deft at blackmail tactics--reducing investments, taking money out of the country. Salinas would have to assume the political and social responsibility that must accompany the stable and sustained growth he aims for. Mexico cannot continue to be, in Disraeli’s famous words, “two nations”--calling itself modern but practicing the politics of a truly archaic and nostalgic capitalism, concentrating wealth in a minority, waiting for trickle-down miracles to happen and cruelly excluding the majority while condemning it as “backward.” If he is to change this state of things, Salinas will have to become the Mexican Gorbachev.

What will change in Mexico? The democratic revolution demands a modernized, more agile electoral system. Nothing discredited the latest official results more than the slowness of the process. The division of powers must function properly, and this means that the judiciary, still caught up in patronage, lack of independence and snail-pace procedures, must catch up with the renovation of the executive and legislative branches. Growth with social justice is the long-term demand of the new electorate, which is also going to demand immediate solutions to at least two big problems. In his first 100 days, the new president is expected to address forcefully the problems of security and pollution blighting the capital city. Nothing less will do.

But for the moment, other problems of insecurity and pollution endanger the country. The official results of the presidential election are being contested in the Congress. The dinosaurs are moving and at times one feels that the PRI and opposition are set on a collision course. There is a climate of tense animosity. It is good to know that, at least, Salinas and Cardenas appear calm and confident.