Ruling Party Drops Threat to Boycott Mexican Congress

Mexico narrowly averted a political crisis Sunday as the longtime ruling party dropped its threat to boycott the first Congress in seven decades not under its control.

The announcement ended a tense standoff in which the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, at one point threatened to anoint its own, separate lower house of Congress. The impasse nearly forced a postponement of President Ernesto Zedillo’s State of the Union address today.

But PRI leaders announced late Sunday that their deputies will attend today’s session formally opening Congress. They also said they will recognize the fiery opposition politician who has been elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house.

“The PRI will not put at risk the stability of our institutions or provoke uncertainty or a loss of confidence,” Ricardo Monreal, the No. 2 leader of the PRI delegation in the Chamber of Deputies, told PRI deputies Sunday night. “We will be builders of a new spirit of tolerance.”

The PRI lost its majority in the lower house in elections July 6. Still, as the party with the largest number of seats in the chamber--239 out of 500--it apparently thought that it could continue to dominate Mexican legislative life as it has for much of this century.

It was in for a surprise. In recent weeks, the four opposition parties formed a majority coalition, with 261 seats in the chamber, and demanded a major role in procedural matters.

The PRI balked at many of the opposition demands. But the four parties flexed their muscles Saturday by going ahead and installing the lower house--ignoring the PRI, which boycotted the session and tried to move it to Sunday.

At their jubilant meeting Saturday, the opposition named as the chamber’s president an outspoken leftist, Porfirio Munoz Ledo, who is considered anathema by the PRI. Another opposition politician was named to head the important steering committee.

The PRI immediately protested. Its members declared that the session was illegal, but constitutional experts disagreed. Some PRI deputies vowed to install their own Congress on Sunday.

Arturo Nunez, coordinator of the PRI deputies, maintained Sunday that there were irregularities in the installation of the chamber. But, in an extraordinary announcement, he said the PRI would overlook the anomalies and accept the opposition’s decisions.

“We don’t want to bring Mexico to a situation of constitutional crisis,” he told a news conference.

He indicated that PRI senators who had threatened to skip today’s session would also back down. The PRI has a 77-51 majority in the Senate, and it has a 316-312 edge in the combined Congress. The party could have prevented Congress from opening by ensuring that there was no quorum.

The PRI even accepted a demand by the opposition to respond to the State of the Union address, Nunez said, adding that Munoz will give that speech.

The PRI announcement came after Zedillo appealed to the parties to negotiate a solution. Business leaders and politicians had also expressed fear that political turbulence could send the country’s financial markets tumbling.

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The brief political crisis highlighted the extraordinary unity between the two main opposition parties--the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party and the conservative National Action Party--despite widely differing philosophies. The opposition also includes two tiny groups.

In the past, the PRI easily divided the opposition by offering government jobs or other benefits to certain politicians. In the latest showdown, the PRI apparently had gambled that it could lure members of the opposition to abandon their recently formed coalition.

But if that was the bet, it failed. To some analysts, the result was the latest sign that the party that has provided nearly all Mexico’s political leaders for 70 years is in disarray.

“Even Clinton can [win over] 15 opposition congressmen,” said a prominent leftist political scientist, Jorge Castaneda. “It’s a piece of cake for any political operative in this country.”

The PRI, he added, “has no leadership, no nothing.”