MEXICO WATCH : Adios al Dedazo?

This has already been some year for political bombshells in Mexico. But now, in the final weeks of the country’s closest presidential race in decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, has dropped another one.

While less dramatic than the peasant uprising, kidnapings and assassinations earlier in the year, Zedillo’s pledge could prove equally profound. In a campaign speech last week, he promised “not to intervene, in any way, in the process of selecting candidates for the PRI.”

If Zedillo, who narrowly leads in most public-opinion polls, is elected president and follows through on that pledge, it would mark the end of one of the hoariest political traditions in Mexico: el dedazo. That literally means to be tapped by the “big finger”--the practice whereby Mexican presidents handpick their own successors and other major PRI candidates.

Of course, both of those qualifications are big “ifs.” Zedillo is being pressed like no PRI candidate has ever been challenged before by major rivals on both the political left and right. While his lead in the polls may hold up on election day, Aug. 21, he is not expected to win an overwhelming victory.

And even if he does win handily, changing that and other political traditions of the hidebound PRI could be easier said than done. Even Mexico’s current reformist president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, once talked of eliminating el dedazo by holding PRI primaries to pick candidates. Instead, he handpicked Zedillo to be his successor. Some old habits are pretty hard to break.