POLITICS : Mexico’s Salinas Earns Barbs, Not Kudos, for New Reforms : Critics complain--and insiders acknowledge--that electoral revisions won’t threaten the ruling party.

For President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a series of long-anticipated electoral revisions passed by Congress in recent weeks could have served as the crowning achievement of his much-ballyhooed democratic reforms.

In lauding the hard-won accords, the culmination of years of effort, the president embraced “political civility” and “dialogue”--still novel concepts in a nation dominated for more than six decades by Salinas’ Institutional Revolutionary Party, the world’s most enduring ruling bloc.

But the entire electoral reform spectacle has served to raise anew a fundamental question: Are the president and his entrenched party truly as wedded to democracy as they are to their bold economic reforms?

The point has added resonance at a time when American lawmakers wary of Mexico’s tradition of one-party dominance are contemplating the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement, cornerstone of Salinas’ economic recovery blueprint.

Critics were quick to dismiss the latest electoral modifications as mere window dressing that poses no threat to the ruling party’s preeminence. Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a leader of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, publicly labeled the reform debate “a fiasco,” and his party’s lawmakers abstained in protest.

Yet even many skeptics, inured to Mexico’s rigid electoral process, call the Salinas-driven reform effort a long-overdue first step--”a concrete democratic advance,” said the daily La Jornada, which also bemoaned the lack of broader improvements.

Despite the revisions, analysts say the Institutional Revolutionary Party will maintain its status as a sort of official party, continuing to control the commission that oversees elections and enjoying virtually unlimited resources.

Among other steps, the electoral reforms: impose the nation’s first-ever caps on federal campaign financing and restrictions on party funding; formalize the role of independent election observers; expand the period for filing post-election complaints, and augment media access for minority parties.

Lawmakers also doubled the number of federal senators, thus opening up more minority-party seats, and diluted ruling-party power in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress.

Most changes will be in place for next August’s presidential election, in which the ruling party is expected to face considerable challenges from both the left and right.

By longstanding law, Salinas cannot succeed himself. But it is his sole right to name his party’s succeeding presidential nominee, an imperial custom unchanged by the winds of reform.

During his almost five years in office, Salinas has striven mightily to level, somewhat, the lopsided electoral playing field and bolster his government’s battered credibility. But reform-minded leaders, insiders acknowledge, are obliged to weigh a delicate balance: Change must be accomplished without jeopardizing the dominant faction.

While Salinas’ government has recognized unprecedented numbers of opposition victories, cries of ruling party fraud and chicanery still haunt contests. And each complaint tugs at the credibility of a president whose narrow majority in the 1988 elections, many believe, was itself largely a product of the electoral “alchemy” for which the system is notorious.

For Salinas, the criticism engendered by his reform initiatives cannot be encouraging--particularly as the free trade debate approaches its decisive phase in Washington. But the president appears to have adopted an ever more pragmatic attitude about the trade pact and its cloudy future.

During last week’s signing of parallel agreements on economic and labor issues, Salinas cautioned that free trade is not a “panacea.” He added: “Mexicans know that these accords . . . will not, by themselves, resolve our problems; that depends on our internal effort, which, without doubt, we are going to double.”