Mexico’s Zedillo Offers to Share Power : Politics: Five days in office, the president reaches out to Congress in sharp break with tradition.

Breaking with seven decades of authoritarian rule, President Ernesto Zedillo formally dined with 500 elected members of Congress on Tuesday and offered what no Mexican president before him ever has: to share the monolithic power of Mexico’s chief of state.

In Tuesday’s unprecedented luncheon at Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies, billed by independent analysts as a cornerstone of Zedillo’s proposed new era of democracy, the 42-year-old Yale-educated economist dramatically and decisively shed the traditional arrogance and aloofness of the Mexican presidency just five days after taking office.

Zedillo was criticized, questioned, challenged and praised as he sat, riveted at his lunch table, through eight consecutive speeches--six of them stern lectures from opposition lawmakers--in what historians said was the first direct dialogue between the country’s president and its congress in 65 years of continuous rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

For more than an hour, legislators blasted Zedillo’s party, known as the PRI, for abusing and monopolizing power and widening the gap between Mexico’s rich and poor. They appealed to the reformist new president to formulate solutions to an array of national crises--from endemic illiteracy, poverty, injustice and crime to a threatened insurgency in the southernmost state of Chiapas.

As the crisis continued to build in Chiapas, and thousands of Indians and peasants arrived in the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez for massive demonstrations for and against the inauguration of a PRI governor scheduled for Thursday, legislators from the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party charged that the smoldering rebellion in Chiapas is the result of years of rule by the privileged over the poor.

Subcommander Marcos, a rebel spokesman, said late Tuesday that his group will consider a cease-fire with the government broken if the PRI candidate is sworn in.

The rebels and the opposition party say the PRI stole the governor’s race in August through fraud.

To the applause of all 500 deputies, many standing and shouting approval, Zedillo brought a clear end to the tradition of his 11 PRI predecessors.

They had shunned a succession of legislatures and ruled with unchallenged authority, reporting only once a year in state-of-the-nation speeches to deputies whose power rested only on paper.

But Zedillo declared firmly: “I have decided that the power of the presidency cannot and should not be an omnipotent power, an omniscient power, nor an omnipresent power.”

Zedillo stressed the historic importance of the moment.

“With this act,” he said of the luncheon, “we start a new, different relationship between the legislative and executive powers of this country. . . . I have the conviction that we all share the commitment to forge a new balance of powers.”

Zedillo then challenged the deputies to assert their constitutional legislative authority as never before, inviting them to stand watch over his presidency, reform the nation’s electoral system and help solve conflicts such as the one in Chiapas.

He also used the occasion to appeal for the legislators--300 representatives of the PRI and 200 from three major opposition parties--to approve a revolutionary judicial reform package that he unveiled in a nationally televised speech late Monday night.

The judicial reforms, rooted in constitutional amendments that must be approved by both houses of Congress, are aimed at rooting out the official corruption and inefficiency that saturate the nation’s police and lower courts.

Zedillo said his proposals for a major overhaul of the police, independent vetting of judges and a powerful special prosecutor’s office to respond to citizens’ complaints of corruption are critical building blocks for a “new rule of law” at a time of national insecurity.

Both the reform plan and Zedillo’s historic meeting with the legislature met with rave reviews from intellectual and opposition circles.

“Ernesto Zedillo is a man in a hurry,” declared prominent Mexico City columnist Sergio Sarmiento under a quotation from Aristotle--”The man separated from law and justice is the poorest of animals.”

Writing in the often irreverent daily newspaper Reforma, Sarmiento praised the president for presenting urgent, concrete proposals on so complex and fundamental a problem as the judicial system before meeting Congress, because “the reform is seeking to give congress major responsibility in this process.”