Disorderly Conduct by the Ruling Party

Last week should have bewildered anyone interested in the democratization of this country of 91 million people.

The elections in the state of Mexico on Nov. 10 were fair and raised hopes. They gave some welcome political breathing room to opposition parties in a state known as the core of PRIismo. The frankness with which the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) recognized its sizable defeats was refreshing.

Largely due to those losses, five days later the old PRI reappeared in a late-night session of Congress. Responding to hard-line PRI lobbies, the party’s majority in the lower house amended accords that the president and the major parties had signed in July. They then stomped opposition objections and rammed through electoral reform barely worth the name. The Senate settled the deal Tuesday.

Far from the “definitive” and “consensus” reform that President Ernesto Zedillo called for two years ago, the legislation returns the political system to the authoritarian past. It severely limits coalition candidacies, the PRI realizing that a united opposition is the greatest threat to its hegemony. It allows unreported political donations. And it sets an outlay of 2 billion pesos in public financing for the four major political parties--five times the amount spent in the state, congressional and presidential elections of 1994. The PRI will get half, and no one doubts that it will be used to buy votes.

All this was just the latest bizarre installment in the melodrama known as “Mexico’s transition to democracy,” which has gone on way too long.

Spain needed only two years after Franco died to agree on new basic political rules. Chile and Argentina required short periods as well. Mexico has been at it for at least eight years. And still it took 22 months to come up with the final legislation, which is likely to cause as much instability as it resolves.

The country still has several fundamental changes to discuss: reforming Congress, establishing the first oversight of the government bureaucracy, inventing a more equal relationship between cities and states and the federal government.

The other night at a Mexico City seminar on the subject, the question that a number of intellectuals considered was, “How will we know when the transition is complete?”

No one had an answer.

What’s on display in Mexico right now are the mighty spasms of the 20th century’s most awesome political machine at war with itself and its nation. The PRI is almost 68, the oldest state party in the world, the most durable authoritarian regime this century has known. By 2000, it will have more uninterrupted time in power than any party anywhere this century.

The key to the PRI’s success was always that it had no ideology beyond self-preservation. Anyone could fit in. Plus the PRI knew that everyone has his price. Instead of talking master race or proletarian dictatorship, the PRI talked pure unalloyed self-interest. So the regime never had to shoot much; it bought off those who could give it trouble: Give us your loyalty, we’ll find some currency you’ll accept--a piece of land, permission to break the law, a research grant, a job. In a poor country it wasn’t hard to do.

PRI control of Mexican society has been so thorough that it has co-opted apartment buildings, workplaces, even chess clubs.

Those deals aren’t so easily broken, those interests not so quickly thwarted, which is why Mexico’s “transition” is taking so long.

The party’s problem now is that, for reasons having to do with Mexico’s economic degradation, there isn’t enough to buy off everyone who can give it trouble. And for reasons having to do with Mexico’s political maturation, more people want to give it trouble.

But, too, this is another era; this is the “end of history,” says historian Francis Fukuyama. The world, especially Latin America, is leaving its authoritarian past behind. Only Mexico is not.

To answer the question put to intellectuals’ the other night: We will know that Mexico is making the transition to democracy when the PRI becomes a true political party, not a state steamroller; when it has an ideology to attract voters’ allegiance; when a PRIista can explain what he believes in besides self-preservation.

When the state party that never had an ideology finally finds one, Mexico will be able to celebrate its own “end of history.”