NEWS ANALYSIS : Results of 2 Key Races Signal New Political Era in Mexico

Official returns in two key state elections Monday heralded a new era of fierce competition between Mexico’s ruling party and the conservative National Action Party, which emerged from the polls with one stunning triumph and one apparent defeat.

With 90% of the vote in Yucatan’s gubernatorial race showing Victor Cervera Pacheco, a member of the Old Guard of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with a razor-thin lead over Luis Correa Mena of the National Action Party (PAN), the battle lines were clearly drawn in the strategic southeastern state.

Observers feared possible violence there in the days ahead as the 35-year-old Correa vowed to protest the official result, which showed a mere three-percentage-point margin in favor of the 59-year-old Cervera.

“The trend of our victory for Yucatan governor is irreversible,” the PRI’s central committee declared in Mexico City in a statement that also conceded the party’s imminent defeat in the gubernatorial contest in Guanajuato, where PAN hard-liner Vicente Fox was scoring a big victory.

President Ernesto Zedillo congratulated both Fox and Cervera for their apparent victories. He called the outcome a victory for democracy, and he invited both men to work closely with his government to forge the new federalism that the Mexican people demand.

But even as the ruling party leadership congratulated Cervera on Monday, independent analysts concluded that his narrow lead, combined with Fox’s sweeping victory in Guanajuato, is likely to radically alter Mexico’s political dynamic--both between its two major parties and within them.

The result, they said, is likely to be greater confrontation between the PRI and PAN at the national level during the politically pivotal months ahead, because the more militant wings of both parties appear to have gained a clear advantage.

Cervera’s emerging victory was seen as a blow to democracy and the reformist factions within the PRI, which was already weakened by its crushing February loss to the PAN in the state of Jalisco.

“The big surprise here is, the old dinosaurs are still the ones who really win elections for the PRI,” political analyst Sergio Sarmiento said. “This is a slap in the face for the party’s young technocrats. What this means is, if you democratize the PRI, the one that’s going to emerge is not the Harvard and Yale PRI, it’s the old PRI that plays at the edges of the rules.”

The internal impact of Monday’s results will be equally dramatic for the PAN.

Fox’s triumph in Guanajuato was a clear victory for the PAN’s more confrontational wing, particularly coinciding with Correa’s emerging loss in Yucatan. Correa is the protege of Fox’s rival, the PAN’s moderate party president, Carlos Castillo Peraza.

Fox’s victory is likely to mean a more vocal and intransigent opposition for Zedillo as the Yale-educated economist struggles to steer the nation out of crisis. And for the PAN, the 52-year-old Fox’s return to the national stage, where he hopes to launch a presidential bid in the year 2000, provides a visible leader for party members who have opposed Castillo’s willingness to negotiate with the ruling party in the past.

With Fox’s faction--who call themselves the Northern Broncos--strengthened, the PAN can be expected to become more confrontational internally as well. But not divisively so.

“There are differences within the party, of course,” said Humberto Andrade, a PAN congressman from Guanajuato. “But the goals and ideology are the same. It is a question of tactics.”

Most independent analysts said the seemingly contradictory results from Yucatan and Guanajuato, taken together, also underscored the polarization of Mexican society, along with the disenfranchisement of its poor.

The PAN, a bastion of Mexico’s middle class, won easily in the relatively well-to-do Yucatan capital, Merida, where it swept the mayoral contest by a nearly 2-1 margin, and in economically better-off Guanajuato, where Fox won by a similar margin. But it lost badly to the PRI in the impoverished rural areas of Yucatan.

“The Yucatan result showed that when it comes to the poor, the dinosaurs have some virtues too,” observed Jorge Zepeda, editor of the independent daily Siglo 21 in Guadalajara.

“In a situation where there aren’t many alternatives, the dinosaurs are the protectors of the welfare state.”

The analysts agreed that Monday’s results were a mixed bag of successes and setbacks for Zedillo’s promised campaign to reform Mexico’s Draconian state electoral politics and separate its authoritarian ruling party from the powers of the government.

Although the PAN made it clear that it plans to fight the result in Yucatan, where just 14,000 votes separated Correa and Cervera, analysts said the PRI’s concession of defeat in Guanajuato was a major democratic advance. Fox’s victory also boosted the PAN’s strategy to build a national base strong enough to challenge the PRI for the nation’s presidency.

“As a general result, I think the election outcome is good for democracy,” analyst Zepeda said. “The victory in Yucatan gives the PRI some breathing room to transform itself.

“If it lost both states, the party would be politically bankrupt,” he said. “The bad part is the message that if the PRI wins an election now, it’ll be a dinosaur who does it. That’s pretty bad news, and it will impact on the party’s technocrats at the national level.”

The PRI’s national leadership readily admitted to the challenges that lie ahead--both internally and externally.

With its February defeat in Jalisco, the PRI lost a 66-year hold on the state and its capital, Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city. In the coming months, the party faces stiff contests in six more states, including the race for the governorship in Baja California. And even Cervera’s narrow lead in Yucatan represents the party’s smallest victory margin there in more than six decades.

“Now more than ever, we must remain united in our convictions and in our partisan fighting spirit,” the PRI leadership concluded in its statement Monday. “We have many battles ahead.”

Fineman reported from Mexico City and Darling from Guanajuato.