Mexicans Ready to Test New Voice at the Polls

Amid the flood of final speeches and campaign-closing events here last week, this nation’s newly independent Federal Election Institute saturated the airwaves with a broadcast message of its own. “Your vote is free. Your vote is secret,” the public service messages declared several times an hour to millions of capital residents. “These elections are yours.”

For Mexicans, today’s vote also will be historic.

For the first time in more than 70 years, Mexico City voters will choose for themselves their City Council members and mayor, filling posts that previously had been appointed by the president.

This move alone will end seven decades of virtual one-party dictatorship in one of the largest cities on the globe--a period that spawned slogans such as “Democracy exists here in Mexico 364 days a year; it’s only missing on election day.”

But there is even more at stake than the powerful mayoralty of the capital, a contest in which opinion polls show left-leaning opposition figure Cuauhtemoc Cardenas far ahead in his bid to become Mexico’s second-most-powerful politician and possibly its next president in 2000.

Nationwide, more than 52 million registered voters also could usher in yet another watershed of democracy by creating--for the first time in decades--a true balance of political power.

That’s because voters in all 31 Mexican states will elect members in the 500-seat lower Chamber of Deputies. And polls show that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, could lose its legislative majority in the chamber for the first time since 1929.

A quarter of the seats in the Senate also are up for grabs, along with six state governorships, control in several state legislatures and scores of mayoralties.

The prospect of changes in all these levels of the Mexican polity, independent analysts and even President Ernesto Zedillo agree, makes the vote a probable turning point for Mexico as it conducts a virtual referendum on the PRI.

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The elections will be the beginning of the end, some say, of the aging, decaying system the party has used to run Mexico through most of this century.

“These elections present the possibility for Mexico to make a peaceful change of its regime for the first time in our history,” said Sergio Aguayo, whose Civic Alliance activist group will field thousands of poll watchers nationwide to help police prevent fraud. “This marks a basic transformation in the rules of the game, in how Mexico is governed and how power is shared. In that process, the PRI still has a place, at least for some time.”

If the PRI loses its majority in Congress and Cardenas wins in Mexico City, he said, “there will be the beginning of a real balance of power and a constant process of negotiation--the real building blocks of democracy.”

Aguayo was among the many analysts who say they believe that the elections also will be Mexico’s most fair and fraud-free federal vote in the 20th century--the culmination of more than two years of electoral reforms that laid the groundwork for today’s vote.

Although Aguayo stressed that no single president or “godfather” deserves credit for the reforms that changed the rules of the game, most of them were pushed through by Zedillo and reform-minded members of his party. Mexico City’s first mayoral election, for example, was among Zedillo’s initial promises after he took office in December 1994.

But if the vote in the capital is the most dramatic result of the reform process, the Federal Election Institute, which will oversee the elections, clearly is the most fundamental.

For the first time, its chief and board are not presidential appointees, and the institute itself no longer is part of the president’s powerful Interior Ministry.

Instead, its board members were selected by the four political parties now represented in the Chamber of Deputies, and its president is a young electoral expert with no party affiliation.

To understand just how radically different these elections will be--this in a country where conservative ruling party politicians are known as “dinosaurs”--also consider that the election institute will propel Mexico’s voting processes not just into modernity but beyond: Local election officials will use the Internet to send vote tallies to the capital, where the institute plans to update results on its home page (https:www.ife.org.mx) every 15 minutes on election night.

Other electoral reforms have brought significant changes in the months-long campaigns that led up to the vote.

Opposition candidates and their parties had unheard-of access to national television and radio through spots subsidized by the election institute. And a new campaign spending law--although rejected by the opposition because it did not go far enough--cut into the PRI’s traditional advantage of having virtually unlimited campaign war chests.

The campaigns were unique in other respects that reflect deep changes in Mexican society.

For the first time, candidates from all parties appealed to women and young voters, two demographic sectors now considered critical to victory. One women’s group is even planning to conduct its first-ever exit polls to determine if there is a difference in voter preferences based on gender. Women represent 52% of Mexico’s registered voters.

Most analysts expect that the biggest loser in all these changes will be the PRI. But few agree on which party, faction or sector of society will be the biggest immediate beneficiary.

Clearly, Cardenas, who in opinion polls last week led his closest opponent by 20 percentage points, could score a major triumph. But neither his Democratic Revolution Party nor the center-right National Action Party seems poised to emerge as a dominant force, according to polls on the state and national levels.

Pollsters predict that the PRI will win gubernatorial races in four of the six states contested. PRI officials said their projections also call for the party to cling to its majority in the lower house; control of that body is a complex matter because 300 seats are directly elected and the other 200 are apportioned based on each party’s percentage of the total vote.

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Even before a ballot has been cast, most analysts agree that the clearest loser in terms of sheer power will be Zedillo and Mexico’s authoritarian, tradition-bound system of the presidencialismo.

But that, after all, was a stated goal of the reformist president. He had promised to make even more reforms in the system in his 1994 campaign.

Soon after Zedillo took office, however, reality and exigencies forced him to abandon his pledge to maintain “a healthy distance” between his presidency and the ruling party. A bungled program to devalue the peso and a dire economic crisis forced Zedillo to enlist party support to push through austerity measures and tax increases that left Mexicans’ wages lagging far behind inflation--a key issue in the vote.

As election day approached, Zedillo moved even closer to the PRI. Fearing that a loss of the party majority in the lower house could endanger his economic policies, even paralyze his government, he took a hands-on role in the campaign. He helped select key PRI candidates and delivered forceful speeches at party conventions.

But in a series of recent television interviews, Zedillo stressed the importance of the vote to the nation’s health--not to his party’s. He dubbed the elections “a fiesta of democracy” and “a parting of the waters” in Mexico’s political history.

In a televised interview last Sunday, he said that all of Mexico’s political parties “understand that everyone is playing a part in the construction of a better democracy, those who win and those who lose . . . and that during and after the election, an extraordinary civility will prevail here because that is the democratic norm to which we all aspire.”

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