PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : Six More Years on a Tightrope? : Zedillo’s task is to keep opening the system, which means weakening his party, without alienating anyone.

Sunday’s stunning resurgence of voter support for Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) may turn out, paradoxically, to be the catalytic event that eventually brings down the world’s longest-surviving one-party-dominant regime, perhaps as soon as the next presidential election, in the year 2000.

The extraordinarily heavy voter turnout and the relatively insignificant number of abuses or violations of electoral laws proved beyond question that Mexico’s newly reformed electoral system worked. Whatever they may have thought of the candidates and their platforms, Mexicans showed that such reforms as freeing the electoral machinery from government control, staffing polling places with ordinary citizens chosen by lot rather than the usual PRI-affiliated bosses and their minions, issuing new, high-tech voter ID cards and revealing presidential candidates to the public in a totally new way (the face-to-face, televised debate) greatly increased their confidence in the security of the electoral system and aroused their interest sufficiently to participate in it.

Now Mexico can move on to a new agenda, which poses challenges no less formidable than holding an open, fair election: how to modernize a political system deformed by 65 years of presidentialism and single-party rule at the national level, and how to consolidate the economic reforms of the past six years while attending to the massive social-welfare deficit and the inequalities in wealth distribution that those reforms have either exacerbated or failed to reduce. Social tensions grounded in these problems will inevitably increase during the next six years, as large segments of the population feel the full impacts of a flood of NAFTA-facilitated U.S. imports and the privatization of ejido (communally held) farm land.

The present anachronistic party system is ill-equipped to deal with this new policy agenda. Moreover, it now confronts a politically mobilized civil society that has clearly outgrown the confines of one-party rule and its authoritarian trappings. If the new electoral system is maintained, turnout in all future contested elections will likely be high, tolerance for the usual electoral chicanery by PRI apparatchiks will approach zero and voters will demand greater accountability from those elected.

Sunday’s returns should not be read as evidence that the public believes that the PRI has somehow reinvented itself and purged itself of its corrupt, abusive elements. Ernesto Zedillo and the vast majority of his party’s congressional candidates were elected by a basically unreformed PRI that has learned to play the democratic game while wielding traditional resources on a staggering scale that no opposition party could have matched.

The key question now facing Mexico is how Zedillo and his inner circle will interpret Sunday’s vote. Will it be seen as a mandate to continue the opening of the political system launched by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari? Or will Zedillo, perceiving no incentive for further tinkering with the system, succumb to the temptation to leave the most dysfunctional element of that system--the PRI itself--to the devices of the old-style politicians upon whom he relied so heavily in his campaign?

Optimists will argue that Zedillo has the skills and support, both at home and abroad, to craft policies that can make the economic reforms of the Salinas presidency socially tolerable and politically sustainable in the long term, while encouraging the huge flows of new investment that will be needed to rebuild Mexico’s employment base. A mature electorate knows the costs of inflationary populist improvisation and will not be expecting a quick fix to the country’s social problems. Zedillo might even be able to renegotiate those aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement that are having the most negative impacts on small and medium-sized Mexican producers.

On the political side, Zedillo’s stated commitment to give his party complete autonomy in the selection of its candidates might expedite the emergence of the kind of energetic, new-style leadership that presidential impositions have systematically discouraged. Decentralization could proceed as more financial resources--not just social-welfare programs like Salinas’ National Solidarity Program--are channeled through state and municipal governments. A combination of citizen demands and technical programs can yield major improvements in law enforcement. Opposition parties can move on to modern roles of devising workable solutions to pressing issues not being addressed adequately by the government, while simultaneously investing more heavily in building grass-roots organizational strength.

A much less positive scenario also can be envisioned: Zedillo takes Sunday’s vote as a mandate for strong economic medicine, maintaining a tight-wage policy and other stringent anti-inflation measures. An exhausted and increasingly underemployed or unemployed public turns to forms of protest that undermine the confidence of investors. The overwhelmingly PRI-dominated Congress elected Sunday will provide no effective checks on executive authority. Efforts to reform law enforcement and the judiciary are subordinated to machine politics.

Meanwhile, continuing this scenario: the politically inexperienced president, lacking the vision, skill or interest to reinforce pro-reform elements of his party, does nothing to halt its deterioration. Rather than a rejuvenated, reformist PRI leadership at state and local levels, there would be a stronger alliance among old-guard politicians aimed at preserving the machinery of authoritarian control that has provoked serious protests and instability in the recent past (Chiapas is only the most egregious case). And opposition parties would continue to operate with an intransigent, anti-system mentality, typified by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, under Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ leadership. Such a siege mentality inhibits the institutionalization of opposition parties and diminishes their credibility in the eyes of the average voter.

If this second scenario should materialize, the Zedillo presidency could culminate in ungovernability and a highly conflicted transition to a more democratic regime six years from now. If so, Mexico’s current year of barely controlled social and political tensions could easily become six more years of living dangerously.