Ruling PRI Suffers Crushing Defeat in Key Mexico State : Election: Opposition PAN heads for a major sweep in Jalisco, dealing president’s party one of its worst losses in 66 years. Wide margin eases fears of violent protests.

Mexico’s ruling party suffered one of the most crushing defeats of its 66 years in power as official election returns Monday showed the conservative National Action Party headed for a major opposition sweep in the strategic state of Jalisco.

With more than half of the official vote tallied, the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, was losing control of the state for the first time since 1929. The PRI was trailing by nearly 20 percentage points in key contests for governor, the state legislature and the mayoralties of nearly a dozen key municipalities, including Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara.

In what is shaping up to be a watershed defeat in a year that will test President Ernesto Zedillo and his party’s power as never before, the opposition’s margin of victory in the Sunday elections appeared so large that the PRI’s gubernatorial candidate, Eugenio Ruiz Orozco, gracefully did what few ruling party candidates have ever done in state elections: He conceded defeat Monday afternoon.

“We recognize the victories that the other parties have won,” a grim but conciliatory Ruiz Orozco told supporters and the media in a downtown Guadalajara hotel ballroom. His concession came as state election officials announced that with 55% of an estimated 2 million ballots counted, Ruiz Orozco had won 35.9% of the vote to 54.5% for 36-year-old Alberto Cardenas Jimenez of the National Action Party, known as the PAN.

Monday’s results were also seen as an even more bitter defeat for the nation’s political left. Mario Saucedo, the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party and a nationally prominent ideologue of its leftist national leadership, was trailing with just 3% of the vote. Many Guadalajarans said that they viewed Saucedo as too extremist and radical for their taste.

The opposition’s apparent victory will not be official until the end of the week, when state election officials say they will release the rest of the returns and formally proclaim a winner. But the results announced Monday afternoon precisely mirrored five independent quick counts released by separate research institutions earlier in the day, and experts said the PAN’s lead statistically cannot be reversed.

Reaching the same conclusion, and displaying a candor rarely seen in a party that has ruled Mexico with an authoritarian hand, Ruiz Orozco responded to the question, “What were you lacking for victory?” with a smile and a quip. “It’s obvious,” he said. “Votes.”

The ruling party’s national president, Maria de los Angeles Moreno, reacted with the new tone of reform that Zedillo is trying to set for the PRI. She acknowledged the opposition’s large lead, attributing it to “the convergence of events of different origins.” And she stressed the party’s commitment to honor it--now and in the future.

“The national executive committee confirms that it will defend each and every vote in the various elections, all of the triumphs of the PRI, and also we will recognize the victories of other political parties that are won cleanly in the polls,” she told reporters in Mexico City.

That tone and the government’s recognition of the opposition’s wide lead helped allay widespread fears of potentially violent post-election protests by members of the ruling party, which has controlled the state’s powerful labor unions, police and its levers of power for nearly seven decades.

A narrow defeat, analysts said, would have brought PRI members into the streets. Last month in the southern Gulf of Mexico state of Tabasco, local members of the PRI who feared that the president was giving in to opposition demands to replace a governor whose election was tainted by fraud charges led a two-day rebellion against the federal government.

Monday’s results, after largely clean, fair and free polling, also erased similar fears of opposition violence if the ruling party had tried to steal a victory, a commonplace event before Zedillo took office Dec. 1 vowing a new era of electoral reform.

As Guadalajara’s streets filled with balloons, honking horns and exultant mariachi bands in the heart of the state where mariachi music was born, most concluded that the results were a victory for democracy as well. It was also a triumph for peaceful change, they said, at a time when the southern state of Chiapas remains on the brink of war.

“It is crucial to understand this message of ballots at a moment in which the viability of politics versus the viability of war is under debate in Mexico,” said the PAN’s national secretary general, Felipe Calderon. His party’s candidate later added, “Finally, the people lost their fear of change.”

The message was the same on the streets.

“If the PAN didn’t win today,” said taxi driver Juan Gonzales, “Jalisco would have turned into a Chiapas overnight. Everyone here would be in the streets ready to fight, just like the Zapatistas were down there.”

But it was not Zedillo’s military crackdown on the Zapatista National Liberation Army hundreds of miles to the southeast of this sophisticated state capital that turned the tide against the PRI in Jalisco, a conservative bellwether state that has stood staunchly by the ruling party throughout most of this century.

“We were just sick and tired of the PRI’s lies,” 30-year-old Francisco Javier said at his chili-and-garlic market stall in Guadalajara’s Tlaquepaque neighborhood. He had just voted for the PAN for the first time in his life. “The PAN will govern for all. The PRI just governed for some.”

But amid such high expectations, in a state that has suffered under Mexico’s recent years of violence and federal neglect and clearly was reacting this week to the nation’s worst financial crisis in more than a decade, most analysts see a tough challenge ahead for the conservative opposition party.

“This victory is beyond the PAN’s expectations, and really beyond their capabilities (to govern),” said prominent Guadalajara newspaper editor and political analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson, whose daily Siglo 21 hit the streets Monday with the headline “Knockout!”

“There’s no question that in the next two years we’re going to have a lot of problems with the PAN ruling Jalisco. The challenge really is beyond their competence. But I think it’s worth it. Democracy is not a point of arrival. It’s a point of departure, in the sense that our problems now will run a normal course,” Zepeda said.

National and local PAN leaders expressed strong concern that the PRI-controlled federal government--and Zedillo himself--still could be an obstacle to their ability to rule effectively when the new government takes power here March 1.

“Our victory doesn’t mean they will let us govern,” said Fernando Estrada Samano, who is the party’s chief liaison with the national Congress in Mexico City.

Yet most analysts concluded that the opposition’s emerging victory here is a historic moment that could well signal the beginning of the end of the PRI nationwide--in its current form, at least.

“There’s no question this is historic, but it is not the death of the PRI. It is a kind of birth,” analyst Zepeda said. “The (reshaping) of the PRI starts now in Jalisco, because it really has hit bottom here. We need the PRI. We need a link to its revolutionary tradition, to its social welfare base--but as an actor, not as ruler.”

For his part, Cardenas, the apparent governor-elect, has declared the ruling party all but dead--”a living corpse,” he said during an interview with The Times last week.

“The PRI is a cadaver living in the past. Their strategies, their principles, their people don’t work anymore,” he said.

But Cardenas made it clear that his strategies are yet to take shape, stressing that the PRI’s problems soon will become his--a daunting task he vowed to approach one thing at a time. As mayor of Ciudad Guzman, Jalisco’s fourth-largest city, Cardenas had won a reputation as a good administrator. But Jalisco is a state of nearly 6 million people.

“It’s absurd to say that on the first day in office I’ll do this or undo that,” he said.

“It would not be proper nor calming if someone would want to take actions from the first day without previous analysis, without knowing what to do,” he said. “I believe that public administration requires maturity, sensitivity and knowledge of what’s really happening. And it’s not as if the world is going to end if nothing happens in the first weeks.

“The way we see it, that was the mistake of the PRI. Term after term, from the first day, they were going to do 1,000 things. And now, what they didn’t do during 66 years, they again said they would do in a single day. Well, it’s clear the people do not believe that anymore.”