In Mexico, a Giant Leap Toward Vote Reform

Mexico took a major step toward sweeping electoral reforms Friday as top officials advanced a measure that would dilute the president’s near-absolute authority, loosen the ruling party’s longtime grip on the levers of power and open elections here to millions of Mexicans living abroad.

President Ernesto Zedillo sent the bill--drafted by Mexico’s leading political parties and dubbed the Reform Initiative--to the House of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, on Friday. Leaders of all four major parties in Congress formally endorsed the measures late Thursday night. Deputies are scheduled to debate and ratify the legislation in a special session that begins next week.

The agreement came after 18 months of rancorous negotiations among Mexico’s major political factions, which will battle in key state, local and federal elections next year.

The 1997 contests will set the stage for Mexico’s next presidential vote, in the year 2000.

And now the 1997 elections will include an unprecedented event: the popular election of Mexico City’s mayor. Until now, the powerful chief executive of the capital--home to almost a quarter of Mexico’s 90 million people--has been appointed by the president.

Zedillo relinquishes that right in the reform bill, which also calls for first-ever elections in the year 2000 for the capital’s district chiefs.

The president also gives up his right to appoint the head of the National Election Institute, which adjudicates vote disputes in federal campaigns.

Zedillo--selected as the presidential candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, two years ago through its closed, back-room process--has vowed to end the archaic politics that has kept his party in power since 1929. Overhauling the nation’s electoral system has been one of the top priorities of his nearly 20-month presidency.

Zedillo has vowed that he will not handpick his PRI successor.

As he signed the bill Thursday night, Zedillo called it “transcendental . . . the result of political reality.”

He said the 17 major changes in Mexico’s constitution, if passed, will give opposition parties more access to campaign financing, the media and newly independent tribunals that take decisions in postelection conflicts out of the president’s hands. The reforms put the tribunals under an independent judiciary headed by Mexico’s Supreme Court.

“Today, united in plurality, we take an essential step in building the democracy that Mexicans want, the democracy that Mexicans need and the democracy that Mexicans deserve,” said Zedillo, flanked by leaders of the PRI and three opposition parties--the National Action Party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party and the Workers Party.

Several of those opposition parties staged walkouts during the long wrangling over election reforms. A ceremony arranged months ago to sign an earlier agreement ended in disaster when the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, refused to attend.

The PRI, a monolith that has used its control over Mexico’s public and private institutions to stay in power, appeared to give up the most in the reforms.

Yet given Zedillo’s stance and a popular outcry for a new political order that revealed itself in several crushing ruling-party defeats in key state polls last year, party President Santiago Onate has indicated that the PRI must support reform or die.

“First, legitimacy--second, the name of the winners. First, democratic governability--second, those who occupy the positions,” Onate said in framing his party’s new electoral stand Thursday night. “We know how to put these superior interests over strictly party interests.”

Voting rights for Mexicans living abroad appeared to be one of the toughest measures for the PRI to accept. Most expatriates--including as many as 4 million living in the United States--live in advanced democracies, and one reason many left Mexico was its draconian politics. The PRI has fought for years against allowing them to vote.

Jose Angel Pescador, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview Friday that the measure is “of singular importance.”

He estimated that it would affect between 2 million and 2.5 million Mexicans in Southern California; he declined to speculate on its political impact but agreed it was a democratic advance.

“Many Mexicans who are staying here [in Los Angeles] want to maintain political ties to Mexico,” he said, “and this is a very appropriate response.”

Independent political analysts in Mexico called the package of electoral reforms historic.

“We are seeing the end of a one-party system,” concluded Jose Woldenberg, an independent member of the national election commission and outspoken political commentator. “We all know that there has been a great imbalance between the different parties in Mexico. And this reform will increase party competition.”

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Opening Up the System

Mexico’s pending Reform Initiative would:

* Permit Mexicans living abroad to vote, affecting at least 2 million Southern California residents and as many as 4 million throughout the U.S.

* Limit private campaign financing, requiring detailed disclosure; redistribute government campaign allocations to give opposition parties more resources.

* Empower Mexico’s Congress to elect the head of the national election commission, a post previously appointed by the president.

* Sanction the 1997 popular election of Mexico City’s mayor, also a presidential appointee in the past.

* Place tribunals that rule in postelection disputes under the Supreme Court to make them more independent.