Mexico Speeds Toward a Stalemate : Opposition Must Give Salinas Room to Act as Power Broker

Since the July 6 election--which he won, according to official statistics, by 50.74%--Mexico’s President-elect Carlos Salinas de Gortari has found himself engaged in a two-front political guerrilla war, trying to assert his authority over his fractious party and to counter moves outside the party to undermine the credibility of the official election results.

Thus far there have been no victors in this high-stakes conflict--only losers. Salinas has been denied the legitimacy that a less bitterly disputed election and multiparty congressional certification of his election would have given him. It is by no means clear, however, that the opposition parties have gained ground, at least in the sense of being able to compete successfully with the ruling party in the longer term.

Salinas’ political-reform project, the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, is now at considerable risk of being stillborn. The ruling party’s fissures were widened by the election outcome, in which dozens of candidates sponsored by powerful party bosses went down to defeat, and even more by the tactics of the opposition parties in the post-election period.

Salinas and his advisers find in the election results much support for their position that fundamental changes--in the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), in relations between the president and Congress, and in the relationship between the state and society--are essential if the PRI is to have the capacity to win future elections without massive and highly disruptive fraud. They see the coming sexenio (the six-year presidential term) as the last chance for such changes to be made peacefully.

But there are many within the PRI, the federal bureaucracy and the state governments who have not yet been convinced of the necessity for such basic reforms. These hard-liners have publicly criticized efforts by Salinas, newly appointed PRI Secretary-General Manuel Camacho and others to negotiate a settlement with the Cardenista front and the National Action Party (PAN). The Salinas group is accused of surrendering power, bit by bit, to ungrateful opposition politicians whose demands are insatiable.

For the “dinosaurs” of the official party, the unprecedented disruption of President Miguel de la Madrid’s final State of the Nation report to Congress by opposition members was the last straw. They now assert that the losing PRI candidates whom they backed in the July elections were “sacrificed uselessly,” in the words of labor chieftain Fidel Velazquez. Unrepentant for the election irregularities that they countenanced and unbowed by the PRI’s dramatic loss of voter support, the old guard has become more militant in its demands that the opposition be more tightly controlled.

Given the narrowness of the PRI majority in the new Congress, traditional power brokers who control significant numbers of PRI members have gained new leverage. Salinas will need all the votes that they control in order to get controversial legislation approved. He must now find a way to placate and therefore ensure “discipline” from the PRI’s old guard without giving away the store and destroying his own credibility as a political reformer.

What does the opposition outside the PRI really want? Publicly, the left-of-center Cardenista front and the conservative PAN have joined forces to prevent the transfer of presidential power to Salinas on Dec. 1. Lacking the votes in Congress to achieve this through the legally prescribed procedures, they now promise to mount massive public demonstrations to exert pressure on the government.

The Cardenistas, because of their strong second-place finish on July 6, are the key opposition players in this drama. Their real objectives seem to be to weaken Salinas as much as possible, to extract maximum concessions from him on economic policy issues, and to keep their own supporters mobilized and unified--a rational short-term strategy, but not sustainable and potentially dangerous in the long haul.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas vows that he will persist in challenging Salinas’ claim to the presidency until it is “proven” that Cardenas didn’t win, through a recount of nearly half the ballots that were cast on July 6. This is a prescription for endless confrontation and political paralysis, since the PRI will continue to resist a recount of the disputed ballots.

No serious analyst of Mexican voting patterns believes that Cardenas actually won the presidency. But a recount would probably show that Salinas did not win an absolute majority, and that his plurality over Cardenas was considerably smaller than the officially recognized results indicate. Given low probability that the PRI would ever hand the opposition such potent ammunition, Cardenista and PANista leaders have two options: They can continue fighting it out with the PRI and Salinas in the streets, or they can refocus their attention on the tasks of party-building, wielding maximum influence over government policy and the federal budget through their presence in Congress, and contending for power at state and local levels.

The first option can lead only to stalemate, or to a situation of ungovernability that increases the potential for mass violence, government repression and even military involvement in the resolution of the political dispute. Under the second option, the opposition would help lead Mexico into a new era of pluralism and competitive politics, of constructive tension between the executive and legislative branches. In the case of the Cardenistas, it would serve to ensure that what is now a personalistic crusade operating through a disparate collection of splinter parties and political movements--spanning the ideological spectrum from orthodox Marxism to social democracy--will evolve into a permanent political party.

Perhaps most important, the choice of a “constructive engagement” strategy by the PRI’s opposition would give Carlos Salinas a chance to deliver on his promise of basic political reform. A six-year delegitimation campaign by the opposition would effectively destroy the constituency within the PRI for such changes. It would also make it much more difficult for the Salinas administration to insist on PRI recognition of opposition party victories in the next round of gubernatorial and local elections.

The opposition has a significant stake in Salinas’ ability to modernize the PRI and turn it into a real political party, not dependent on the state for its victories. Whatever concessions the opposition parties may wring from the next government in terms of reforming the electoral code, gaining greater access to the mass media or strengthening the legislature vis-a-vis the presidency, they will be of little consequence if the PRI’s old guard retains its capacity to organize and carry out electoral fraud.

Indeed, this has been the central weakness of Mexico’s various experiments in political liberalization since 1970: The focus has been on altering the terms of competition between the PRI and its opposition, not on changing the way in which the PRI conducts itself.

While internal reform of the PRI does not guarantee democratization of the whole political system, it is a necessary precondition for a genuinely competitive system. The opposition parties have an essential role to play, but political reality dictates that the PRI must be the central protagonist in the political opening process.

Recognition of this fact will require the kind of long-term vision from opposition leaders that has been in short supply since the election in July. They continue to view Salinas as the creature and the captive of the system from which he emerged. The time has come to put Salinas’ oft-stated intentions to the test, by giving him the maneuvering room within the ruling party that he must have in order to push political reform forcefully.