A Vote for Continuity : Salinas again picks a candidate in his own image

Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has opted for continuity in selecting Ernesto Zedillo to succeed Luis Donaldo Colosio, the slain presidential candidate. And even though Zedillo’s selection was secretive, in keeping with outdated Mexican political traditions, anyone who wants stability must hope Zedillo can calm the nation’s turmoil.

As the candidate of the potent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Zedillo, 42, is now the odds-on favorite to win the Aug. 21 election. The economist shares traits with both Salinas and Colosio, who was assassinated last week in Tijuana. No doubt the similarities helped reassure Salinas that his choice of Zedillo was a safe one, and Salinas no doubt hopes those similarities will reassure Mexican and foreign investors whom Mexico needs to keep its slowly reviving economy on a course of liberalization.

With master’s and doctoral degrees from Yale, Zedillo, like his two immediate PRI predecessors, has strong Ivy League credentials; Salinas did graduate work at Harvard and Colosio studied at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although he was born in Mexico City, Zedillo was raised in Baja California and considers himself a norteno, as northern Mexicans are known. Nortenos tend to be more comfortable about close ties with the United States than their countrymen. Colosio was from the Arizona border state of Sonora, and Salinas from Nuevo Leon, which borders on Texas.

Zedillo worked his way up in the government not by running for office but as a bureaucrat, mostly in the Bureau of Planning and Budget. That is where Salinas made his reputation as a tough-minded economist before being picked as PRI presidential candidate by then-President Miguel de la Madrid, yet another economist who headed Mexico’s budget office before becoming president in 1982.

This pattern of foreign-trained bureaucrats winning the PRI nod has angered many old-line party activists, who disparage the young upstarts as technocrats. However, Salinas was wise to ignore that PRI wing, which had its own ideas about who should succeed Colosio. It may also have been politically astute for Salinas to ignore the calls of many progressive Mexicans for a more open nominating process. If he had left the nomination to a PRI convention or primary, it is very unlikely that Zedillo, who has never run for office, would have won.

Ironically, this may be a case where old-style Mexican politics, in which a president handpicks his successor, works to the benefit of change and progress. For despite their lack of appeal in the PRI, “technocrat” presidents are popular with the investors and business people Mexico needs to build a modern economy.