Mexican Party Appears to Take Hard Left Turn

Mexico’s second-largest opposition party was taking a hard turn to the left Monday, apparently electing a firebrand activist to lead it into Mexico’s next presidential election in the year 2000.

Preliminary official results from the nation’s first direct party polls showed that Manuel Lopez Obrador was leading by a surprisingly wide margin among the 300,000 votes cast by members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, nationwide. Party officials said final results from Sunday’s vote will not be announced until next week, but unofficial tallies from 60% of the polling booths showed Lopez Obrador winning by 5 to 1 over his closest rival.

Lopez Obrador has led militant grass-roots campaigns against the governor of Tabasco, which is his home state, and the nation’s oil monopoly since losing a fraud-tainted gubernatorial election there in 1994. He was considered the most radical choice of the three PRD presidential hopefuls.

“It shows, most importantly, a turn--a turn placed on the party itself,” said Emilio Zebadua, who heads the political science department at Mexico City’s Colegio de Mexico. “The majority of the common people in Mexico expressed that they want a party of the left--a more combative party representing their social demands.”

Zebadua and other analysts here said the emerging PRD leader, who also has championed causes of Mexican migrants in the United States, is likely to be a strong advocate for the Mexican community in Southern California--a traditional bastion of support for a party that has embraced many of Mexico’s intellectuals, peasant activists and expatriates.

Although Lopez Obrador’s leadership is expected to radicalize the populist PRD, many analysts viewed that as a positive development.

“It’s good for the general configuration of political parties in Mexico,” Zebadua said. “A lot of people who have lost faith in the political party system and gone outside the institutions and structures of state now at least will have somewhere they can turn.”

Sunday’s party poll--a rare democratic exercise in a nation where the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has picked its leaders largely in secret--was marred by widespread absenteeism and charges of fraud.

Amid internal bickering, the PRD has trailed a distant third behind the PRI and the center-right National Action Party in most key state and federal elections that have been held since 1994.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the PRD candidate who finished third in the 1994 presidential election, did not stand for party president Sunday, but he openly backed Lopez Obrador and the party’s activist wing.