NEWS ANALYSIS : Democracy is the Biggest Loser in Mexico State Election

What if they gave an election and nobody came? Or what if they gave an election and nobody believed in it? To a degree, both of those things happened last Sunday, when only about 30% of registered voters cast ballots in the state of Mexico.

The election for mayors and a legislature in the state of Mexico--and another in the state of Hidalgo on the same day--was to test the political modernization promised by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the credibility of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico for more than 60 years.

The PRI has claimed a landslide in Mexico state, apparently winning all but four of 121 mayoralties and the entire 34-seat legislature. Partial official returns issued Friday were confirming the PRI figures. Results in Hidalgo were equally lopsided.

Opposition parties on the left and right charge that the PRI resorted to massive fraud. The conservative National Action Party and the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party are calling for large portions of the vote to be annulled. In Mexico state, National Action has challenged results in 1,000 of 4,293 polling places, while the Democratic Revolutionary Party has challenged 4,000.

But what may have been more significant than the alleged fraud in the outcome of Sunday’s election is the fact that the vast majority of registered voters avoided the polls--and most of those apparently belonged to the opposition.

The PRI received only slightly more votes than it did in the 1988 presidential campaign, when leftist leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won in the state of Mexico by a wide margin.

But nearly 1 million people who voted for Cardenas in 1988 did not vote this time, and National Action received at least 160,000 fewer votes. The ruling party did not win those people over--they simply stayed home.

The reason, according to non-voters interviewed on election day, was a lack of confidence in the electoral process.

“No matter who you vote for, the PRI always wins,” one typical non-voter said. “They’ll never respect the vote.”

Many Cardenas supporters believe that he won the election nationwide and that the government stole the presidency for Salinas.

PRI officials acknowledge a credibility problem but assert that their party won the Mexico state election fair and square with a vigorous campaign. Indeed, the ruling party did launch an elaborate campaign to identify its supporters block by block, woo its opposition in key areas and get out the vote on election day.

But the PRI also was buoyed by unfair advantages that it enjoys as the government party. The government pumped $92 million into Mexico state through its Solidarity public works program, which was closely identified with the PRI. The Solidarity logo is red, white and green, the colors of the PRI and of the Mexican flag.

PRI officials say they never used Solidarity as part of the campaign, but even at the party’s closing rally in the municipality of Naucalpan, Solidarity was a prominently featured slogan.

In another example, government and pro-government television ran frequent advertisements for the PRI, but no opposition ads were to be seen.

The opposition charges that the PRI was more than advantaged. Among the charges:

* That it issued multiple voting cards to PRI supporters, allowing them to vote more than once.

* That its detailed analysis of voters in the 1988 election was used to “shave” opposition supporters from the registration rolls.

* That election officials took registration cards away from opposition supporters during the two months before the vote and failed to issue them new ones.

* That they “intimidated” the opposition, threatening to withdraw tortilla and milk subsidies and other government benefits.

PRI President Luis Donaldo Colosio admitted that there may have been “irregularities” in about 100 polling places in Mexico state on election day, but he said that was not enough to change the results of the election.

“In the state of Mexico, we prepared conscientiously. We won with organization and work. . . . We learned our lesson in 1988,” Colosio said.

For years, the PRI called itself the party of the majority. It often claimed election victories with 75% to 90% of the vote, and in 1976, PRI candidate Jose Lopez Portillo ran for president unopposed. Several times when National Action challenged the PRI at the state and local level, the government was accused of stealing the race.

The ruling party was stunned by the 1988 presidential election, which Salinas officially won with 50.3% of the vote--the lowest ever for a PRI candidate. When he took office, Salinas vowed to see Mexico into an era of truly competitive multi-party politics, what he called political modernization.

Soon after, the government acknowledged defeat to the National Action Party in the governor’s race in Baja California, but elections in Michoacan, Guerrero and Coahuila states were fraught with charges of fraud.

Now, once again in Mexico, the PRI won the vote but failed to win the credibility it sought. The PRI won the state vote with about 17% of the 4.3 million registered voters--hardly a sweeping mandate.

The opposition, on the other hand, also suffered a devastating setback. Not only did their parties fail to achieve power, but they also failed to persuade their supporters to vote. In the end, public distrust hurt the opposition more than it hurt the PRI, which had the resources to get out its supporters.

Cardenas, who ran on a coalition ticket in 1988, showed that he has not yet converted his Democratic Revolutionary Party into a force strong enough to mobilize its members. National Action, which is 50 years old, says fraud kept it from victory in Naucalpan, the state’s wealthiest municipality where they had strong support.

Last week, the dispute over election results in the town of Chinconcuac led to a confrontation between PRI and Democratic Revolutionary Party supporters that left nine injured, six of them with gunshot wounds.

In the end, political observers say, the biggest loser in the Mexico state election is not any single party, but the development of democracy in Mexico.

“My impression is that these were neither free nor fair elections,” said attorney Jose Agustine Ortiz Pinquetti, who observed the Mexico state vote for a new watchdog group called Council for Democracy.

“Much of the fraud was on the border between legal and illegal. But what’s clear is that there is no will on the part of the government to move toward a democracy. The will is to restore the old system,” he said. “This is a blow not just for the opposition, but for democracy. If the opposition loses its base, the system will not tend to become more democratic.”