Ruling Party to Name New Chief in Mexico

Mexico’s longtime ruling party, desperately seeking strong leadership to face crucial elections next year, prepared Saturday to choose a new president.

The party, which has been buffeted by election losses and infighting, is expected to choose the president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, in a meeting today. Humberto Roque Villanueva, a close ally of President Ernesto Zedillo, is also known as a canny negotiator within the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

Analysts said the change in leadership could strengthen Zedillo, who has faced resistance from party members opposed to his free-market economic reforms.

Opposition parties, however, declared that the shuffle will not halt the stunning slide of the PRI. The party “wants to put fresh paint on a building that is crumbling,” said Armando Quintero, a leader of the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. “But they have to realize that they can’t continue holding a monopoly on power.”

The former PRI leader, Santiago Onate, resigned late Friday, 16 months after he took the job hoping to reverse the party’s election losses.

Onate said he stepped down because the party needs a “new push” to face midterm elections next year. Next year, the PRI risks losing its congressional majority for the first time in seven decades--as well as the powerful mayoral post in Mexico City.

Using patronage and electoral fraud, the PRI has won every presidential election since 1929 and dominated most other national and local races.

But voters incensed by a severe economic crisis, corruption scandals and the authoritarian political system have increasingly punished the PRI. Most recently, the party lost control of the local Congress in the central state of Mexico--long one of its strongholds.

In another striking sign of the PRI’s shrunken prospects, several politicians have resigned from the party in recent days, some joining the opposition.

On Saturday, Francisco Luna Kan, a former Yucatan state governor who once served as the PRI’s national secretary-general, announced he was leaving the party.

And those aren’t the only problems facing Roque Villanueva. In addition to staunching the PRI’s electoral bleeding, he will have to contend with a party that has thumbed its nose at the president.

At its national assembly in September, for example, the PRI made it far more difficult for U.S.-educated “technocrats” without traditional party careers to be elected to top political jobs. That was seen as a jab at Zedillo, 44, a Yale-educated economist.

The PRI also bucked Zedillo’s plan to privatize much of the country’s petrochemical industry, a cornerstone of his economic program.

Delal Baer of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies characterized the choice of a Zedillo loyalist to head the PRI as “a major move” to assert control over the party.

“With the appointment of Roque Villanueva, Zedillo significantly enhances his ability to cajole his own party and generate support for his policies,” said Baer, who is in Mexico writing a book about politics.

But opposition politicians were cool to Roque Villanueva, a 53-year-old economist from the northern state of Coahuila.

“Roque is from the most backward group of the PRI,” said PRD leader Andres Lopez Obrador. He charged that the PRI, under its new leader, “is going to try to stop the advance of the democratic movement with fraudulent practices.”