PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : Zedillo Is Betting on the Status Quo : Counting on popular resistance to change, the new president has announced reforms only in the judiciary.

Since the 1960s, outgoing Mexican presidents have left office under a cloud. Since the ‘30s, incoming leaders have blended change and continuity in just the right doses to ensure both a break with the discredited predecessor and the survival of the political system and machinery that brought the successor to power. Ernesto Zedillo, last week inaugurated as Mexico’s 11th consecutive full-term, full-powered and single-party president, is playing by the rules--and doing so with all the skill and ingenuity his forerunners have traditionally demonstrated.

Mexican presidents since 1934 have sought to reform the one-party, authoritarian political system. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, they have proved remarkably successful at changing just as much as necessary to ensure the system’s survival. All of them have initially hesitated between being the last in the line of the system’s saviors or the first in line of the architects of the new system. So with Zedillo: He is intelligently moving to preserve the system, perhaps going further than others because more is needed, but not to bury it and build something new.

The basic premises of his actions are self-evident: First, the system can be saved with significant but feasible repairs; second, the Mexican people do not believe the system is in crisis, are not fed up with it and, given some changes, prefer continuity to transition.

On the first count, Zedillo has installed the first coalition government--of a sort--in years by naming a leader of the right-of-center Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN) as his attorney general. This widely praised appointment lends credibility and viability to Zedillo’s second stage of the system’s overhaul: the announcement of a major reform of the country’s judicial process, believed to be the most flawed, corrupt and despised of the nation’s institutions. While the reform’s details remain vague and effectiveness in question, simply by acknowledging the deficiency and promising to amend it, Zedillo has reversed part of the political system’s discredit. He will, on this score, still be judged by the results he delivers in the investigation of Mexico’s two political murders this year, but reforming law enforcement and the administration of justice is a fine way to begin his term.

The third crucial step Zedillo has taken is to reestablish “diplomatic relations” with the other opposition, the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which supported Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ run for the presidency in 1994. During the entire presidency of Carlos Salinas, the country’s chief executive and its then main opposition did not even talk publicly, let alone cooperate. Zedillo has taken advantage of the consequences of Cardenas’ devastating defeat in the August elections to build bridges with the PRD congressional caucus. For now, Zedillo’s honeymoon with PRD members is contributing to a lowering of tension in Mexico’s cities if not Mexico’s politics.

These changes are considerable; a sea change they are not. Indeed, Zedillo’s message seems to belie the gravity of the system’s crisis: Everything else is business-as-usual. The rest of the new president’s Cabinet is lackluster. His inaugural speech, though dotted with moving passages, was mostly uninspiring. Beyond the rhetoric of dialogue and reconciliation, there is so far scant substance. Zedillo appears to believe that there is nothing terribly wrong with Mexico and that a majority of Mexicans agree with him.

He may be right. The August vote produced an ample Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) majority, albeit with some tampering. Mexicans are scared of too much change and the turbulent events of this year--an armed uprising, two kidnapings, two assassinations, an election and several splits in the PRI--have not irreparably upset the party’s legendary hegemony.

But if Zedillo is wrong, he is playing with the proverbial fire. The cost the country has paid in the past for each president’s success in saving the system has been high; in recent decades, exorbitant. If the system is in fact beyond repair or if the Mexican people have had their fill of it, business-as-usual, however peppered with imagination and verve, will not do.