The Fear Vote Gives Way to the Punishment Vote

We’ve gone from ‘patriotic fraud’ to Walter Cronkite in less than 10 years!”

So said my Mexican friend on Sunday night after watching several hours of televised election returns. He was celebrating Mexico’s remarkable passage from a political system in which blatant fraud in northern border-state elections in 1986 was publicly condoned by a senior leader of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (because “allowing” opposition parties to win governorships in such important states could compromise national sovereignty) to one in which government respect for voters’ preferences is expected --indeed, demanded. This and other key elements of modern democratic politics are swiftly becoming routine in Mexico.

Recurrent economic crises (1976-77, 1982-89, 1994-96) were the most powerful catalyst for this revolution in citizen expectations. Most Mexicans suffered severe economic pain, directly attributable to government mismanagement of the national economy, during these two decades.

The 1988 presidential election brought a tidal wave of anti-government protest voting, but the government could contain the discontent and keep the PRI in power because it completely dominated the machinery of elections as well as the mass media. In the 1994 election, the PRI could ride the coattails of a still popular president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and take advantage of anxieties created by the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and a spate of high-profile political assassinations. PRI propaganda frightened voters with images of destabilizing violence and massive capital flight if an opposition party won at the national level.

In 1997, however, the voto de miedo (fear vote) was overwhelmed by the voto de castigo (punishment vote). Voters were furious at having been deceived twice by their government, first during the oil boom era of 1977-81 and then during the Salinas presidency (1988-94), periods when the government created an illusion of prosperity and boundless future economic gains.

Despite desperate attempts to distance itself from the now-despised Salinas, who is almost universally blamed for the economic crisis that engulfed Mexico within weeks after he left office, and the spectacular corruption scandals that emerged from his administration, the PRI in 1997 simply could not escape the taint of Salinismo. And President Ernesto Zedillo’s frequent declarations that his policies had brought an end to the deep recession caused by a botched devaluation of the peso in December 1994 only added insult to injury. “When did that happen?” Mexicans asked themselves, choosing to focus on the continuing slide in real incomes and the scarcity of jobs rather than the impressive recovery in macroeconomic indicators that Zedillo has engineered.

Public confidence that a vote for some alternative to the PRI would be respected by the authorities was boosted significantly by the 1994 and 1996 reforms of the federal electoral law, which the government proposed and the PRl endorsed only under intense pressure from citizens and the opposition parties. So many procedural safeguards were built into the conduct of elections through these reforms that the worst, old-style forms of vote fraud--stuffing ballot boxes and stealing them, “shaving” suspected opposition party sympathizers from the voter rolls, multiple voting by PRI supporters, falsifying vote tallies--became virtually impossible without provoking a public uproar and subjecting the perpetrators to heavy fines and jail sentences.

Most important, a new federal elections agency independent of government and PRI authority was created and made responsible for organizing all phases of the electoral process, giving all parties access to the media, allocating public funds for campaigns, recruiting and training ordinary citizens to run the polling places, counting votes and certifying the results.

The level of security in the system is now high enough to motivate a majority of Mexicans to participate. The turnout last Sunday was exceptionally high for a midterm election, approaching 75% in Mexico City and 60% nationally. An exit poll conducted in Mexico City found that voters rated the electoral process at 8.3 on a 10-point scale.

Nevertheless, preelection surveys revealed that from 35% to 46% of the electorate still harbors doubts about the integrity of the process.

From this perspective, Cuauhtemoc Crdenas’ 22-percentage-point victory over his PRI opponent to head the government of Mexico City should be a great confidence builder. Far more than the PRI’s loss of an absolute majority in the lower house of Congress and the loss of its two-thirds majority in the Senate, the transfer of power to an opposition government in Mexico City after 68 years of presidentially appointed PRI mayors symbolizes to the average Mexican that the country is truly progressing toward a competitive, pluralistic political system.

At polling places in Mexico City, I encountered widespread skepticism among voters that federal authorities would “allow” Crdenas to win, despite his overwhelming lead in preelection polls. As one voter in the low-income Iztapalapa district put it: “I just have to hope that they’ll respect my vote, because I’m going to vote for the one who never wins.” He referred to Crdenas, who is thought to have been cheated of victory in the 1988 presidential election and was declared to have run third in the 1994 presidential contest.

With the Zedillo government’s recognition of Crdenas’ election and of the PRI’s defeats in at least 112 congressional races throughout the country, the PRI’s vulnerability has been fully exposed. Mexicans are looking forward to a titanic struggle for the presidency in 2000, between Crdenas and Guanajuato Gov. Vicente Fox, the current frontrunner in the center-right National Action Party (PAN). Significantly, what the PRI will do in that election seems of little concern to most people.

Recent surveys of the national electorate have shown that the PRl’s accumulated liabilities are dragging it down, even in states where it runs its best candidates. Forty-two percent of Mexicans in one national sample said they would refuse to vote for any PRI candidate this year, compared with only 11.5% who said they would not vote for a PAN candidate and 17.7% who would reject a candidate of Crdenas’ center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Like those Americans who voted in 1996 for a Republican Congress to keep a Democratic president in check, Mexicans who went to the polls on Sunday seemed well aware of the potential hazards and benefits of divided government. Many of them worried that Zedillo and other federal officials might not allow Crdenas to do his job without hindrance. But they considered this a risk well worth taking. At minimum, they believe, the top-to-bottom housecleaning of the Mexico City government that Crdenas has promised should reduce corruption and liberate resources in the city’s $4.6-billion budget for much needed services and crime fighting. And if an opposition-controlled federal Congress puts obstacles in the path of a president whose economic policies have been injurious and forces him to negotiate budget priorities, so much the better.

There is a rapidly spreading belief in Mexico that alternation in power among the three main parties is both desirable and achievable at all levels of governance. Most Mexicans seem to have concluded that it is time to get on with the business of modern democracy.