Next Step : Democracy Poised to Win in Mexico : A reformed Congress will likely clip the wings of any president.

By MARK FINEMAN

Aug. 16, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MEXICO CITY —

Almost unnoticed in the final blitz of rallies, opinion polls and punditry surrounding Mexico’s most hotly contested presidential elections in six decades was this prediction by author Carlos Fuentes:

“Mexico will have a bad president, with a good government. . . . He will be a little crippled, because of the way in which he will be elected, a bit one-armed, because of the composition of the Congress (that will be elected the same day), and therefore he will only be able to govern by negotiation.”

That, in fact, is among the few shared truths in what promises to be Mexico’s least predictable and yet most democratic national elections of this century. Sunday’s electoral showdown is an experiment in pluralism, pegged at a cost of $2 billion by outgoing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, that politicians and analysts agree almost certainly will chart a more democratic course for this nation of 92 million as it navigates through endemic poverty, elitist wealth, massive unemployment and potential social unrest.

Unprecedented in the uncertainty of its outcome after 65 consecutive years of rule by a single, monolithic political force, the heated and costly campaign for the presidency, Congress and two state governorships already has built several key pillars for fundamental democractic change.

Eight independent political parties--the largest number ever--are competing for power with the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI-ruled government has spent $730 million on a state-of-art, computerized voter-registration and identification system that has been embraced by all but one of those parties. The government also will permit international observers and a U.N. team of experts to monitor the vote independently for the first time. And each of the three leading presidential candidates has, as a campaign centerpiece, shared commitments to a major overhaul of Mexico’s often-corrupt and traditionally authoritarian political system.

The most prominent of those promised reforms are the candidates’ vows of power-sharing in the omnipotent executive branch.

The ruling party’s candidate, 42-year-old Ernesto Zedillo, who has posted a commanding lead in opinion polls commissioned largely by international banks and other institutions that prefer the PRI, has vowed to consider members of the opposition for his Cabinet if he wins. His leading challenger, 53-year-old Diego Fernandez de Cevallos of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), has made a similar public pledge. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who many believe was cheated out of the presidency through fraud in the 1988 elections, has made no such public vow, but supporters of his center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) said they expect some level of power-sharing if Cardenas surges from his third-place position in the polls to win.

But there are several less obvious but potentially more far-reaching reforms put in place by Salinas that will kick in with almost immediate effect after the elections. And, of those, the most dramatic are changes in the size and composition of the Congress. It is these changes that Fuentes and other respected Mexican analysts have concluded--barring civil war or massive Election Day fraud--inevitably will propel Mexico into a new era of lively, although potentially turbulent, democracy.

In short, those analysts say, no matter which of the three leading presidential contenders is elected to lead the nation into the 21st Century this Sunday, this experiment in pluralist democracy is almost certain to transform the internal balance of power here.

And it will do so, they say, by shattering the traditional role of Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies and its Senate, both historically rubber-stamp bastions of a president handpicked by the ruling PRI.

Overnight, the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, which will be elected under a new proportional representation system that precludes a two-thirds majority for any party, will become a far more autonomous political force, according to independent and ruling party analysts.

The Senate will double in size to 128 seats, many of which will go to the opposition. And both houses are expected to become far more free-wheeling marketplaces of power, in which the PRI will be unable to alter the nation’s constitution as it has with abandon in the past.

Under the constitution, the Congress does have extensive powers of checks and balances. It just never has chosen to exercise them. And under the new rules of the game, the opposition and ruling party alike agree that Mexico’s political landscape is bound to resemble more the U.S.-style balance of power between the legislative and executive branches.

“The effect is that the executive in power cannot pass all the laws he wants,” said Carlos Castillo, PAN’s president and chief strategist, who predicted that his party will win at least 140 seats in the new Chamber of Deputies. “It’s a more balanced system of power, and it is the same if Zedillo or Diego will win.”

Other analysts, particularly those associated with Cardenas and the PRD, are not as confident that the changes will come so swiftly--or even directly--through the next Congress.

Jorge Castaneda, a respected analyst and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the PRI still could create an effective two-thirds majority by forming alliances with smaller parties, as it did after the 1988 presidential elections.

But Castaneda, who is among the founding members of a center-left collective of intellectuals known as the San Angel Group, said that fundamental power-sharing is at hand.

“The whole San Angel premise is that no one will win with more than 40% of the vote,” he said. The legislature will be fractious, the nation polarized and civil unrest a threat, Castaneda said.

Under such conditions, he added, “the premise is that Mexico is ungovernable with a PRI president. You will need a coalition government--a real coalition that includes everyone. You have to share power--really share power--and you have to get a deal on a common program.”

Predictably, the PRI’s Zedillo and his party’s once-unbeatable political machine scoff at such a scenario. Using the final, though yet unproven, poll results released by pro-PRI institutions last Friday (most showed Zedillo with more than 40% support to 20% for Diego and 10% for Cardenas), they are striving to set the stage for a major PRI victory.

The ruling party quickly points out, however, that even if he wins big, Zedillo has publicly committed himself to significant power-sharing and to the new, independent role of Congress.

In an Aug. 4 speech that shocked members of the PRI’s old guard, who have come to be known as “dinosaurs,” Zedillo promised a series of radical reforms, both within the party and in its relations with the executive branch.

“The premise of the relationship between the executive power and the legislature is that it strictly respects the legislature’s autonomy,” Zedillo declared. “The pluralist composition of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate represents a fundamental factor for independent politics.

“The executive must not only obey the decisions of the legislature, it must also work respectfully and concertedly with Congress . . . (to) ensure a balance and a counterbalance between the powers.”

Hardly radical to a U.S. audience, such commitments from the PRI’s presidential hopeful are borderline surreal when viewed through the prism of Mexican Congresses past.

Here’s a glimpse through that prism:

When the Mexican legislature adjourned for Christmas last December, Sergio Aguayo declared in a front-page commentary in the highly regarded daily La Jornada, “The Mexican Congress closed the year with another brilliant demonstration of irrelevance and insensitivity.

“With few exceptions, the Mexican legislature behaved according to the absolutely predictable rules: One party, the PRI, dominated the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate; the members of this party always obeyed the orders of the president of the republic, and the result was: Congress approved everything--absolutely everything--that the executive sent.”

Among the illustrations of that irrelevance culled from the files of the last Congress: the days-long debate about Madonna last October.

For seemingly endless hours, the deputies wrangled over a resolution to ban a scheduled Madonna concert. “Why Madonna ‘No’ and Michael Jackson ‘Yes?’ ” PRD legislator Cristobal Arias asked PRI legislator Fernando Lerdo, who had objected to the singer’s performance on the grounds of cultural sovereignty.

His arguments against the concert included: “It denigrates us; it’s part of the garbage that other countries reject, and it promotes the most odious of sins, like homosexuality, lesbianism, sodomy.”

Such have been the legislative realities that they have created a collective frustration among the opposition, which was embodied in one PRD legislator who came to be known as “the egg lady.” She had tried--and failed--to bring baskets of eggs into the legislature to throw at the ruling party. On one occasion, however, she managed to play a tape of John Lennon’s “Imagine” to underscore a vitriolic attack on the absence of democracy in the legislature.

Despite the PRI power, there nevertheless have been illustrations of the popular demand among most Mexicans to reform the Congress into a truly democratic body.

During a particularly heated debate on a landlord-tenant bill that Salinas was pushing through Congress, a furious mob representing more than 20 civic organizations stormed the Chamber of Deputies.

They smashed windows, wounded a security guard and spent seven hours protesting, trying to pressure the ruling party into backing away from the bill. But a month later, with the Chamber of Deputies under heavy guard, the bill skated through.

It is this kind of lopsided vote that opposition strategists such as PAN’s Castillo expects to end when the new legislature is seated. It is not as if he expects his party to take control of Congress.

In fact, he said, he expects the PRI to maintain its majority in the legislature--even if Fernandez wins the presidency.

But Castillo, confirming what several ruling party officials have indicated privately, said an ultimate irony would take shape if Zedillo wins and tries to force reforms on a legislature dominated by old-guard PRI deputies.

“I think Zedillo will have more problems than Diego in working with Congress,” he said, “because Zedillo is not very well-appreciated among many within the PRI.”

Powerful History

Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party has claimed up to 75% of the Chamber of Deputies in recent years. But new laws preclude any party from occupying so many seats. Elections for the body are held every three years.

% of Chamber of Deputies seats

PRI: Institutional Revolutionary Party

PAN: National Action Party

1991

PRI: 65%

PAN: 18%

Other Parties: 18%

1988

PRI: 53%

PAN: 20%

Other Parties: 27%

1985