Mexico’s Ruling Party Replaces Its Leader

Mexico’s longtime ruling party ousted its leader and named a new party president on Thursday in a desperate effort to regroup after its worst electoral losses ever.

Mariano Palacios, 45, a former governor, was the only candidate for the job and was elected unanimously. He will be the sixth party president in three years--a reflection of the disarray in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico single-handedly for most of the past seven decades.

Palacios replaces Humberto Roque Villanueva, a combative politician whose demise was sealed when the PRI took a pounding in the July 6 midterm elections. For the first time, the party lost its congressional majority. Analysts said the low-key Palacios appeared to be a compromise aimed at satisfying both party reformers and old-guard conservatives.

“The party is so fragile and so divided right now that they need a figure whose first duty will be to not divide the party further,” said Delal Baer, a Mexico expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Palacios takes over a party that has reached a nadir. Voters have used the country’s increasingly clean elections to punish the PRI for its corruption scandals and the recent recession. Now, like the former Communist parties of Eastern Europe, the PRI is grappling with how to survive in a multi-party system. Its shock at having lost its monolithic power was obvious earlier this month, when opposition parties in the lower house of Congress formed a majority and awarded themselves choice legislative jobs. Stunned, the PRI threatened to boycott Congress. Its deputies later backed down.

In an unusual step, several prominent PRI members called this week for open elections to choose their new leader. But Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo appeared to resort to the dedazo--or finger-pointing from above--to select Palacios. His nomination was officially announced by a PRI union leader as he emerged from a meeting Tuesday at the presidential palace.

Zedillo had vowed to abandon the tradition in which the national president essentially ran the ruling party, even picking its national presidential candidate. But the party’s recent electoral defeats appear to have strengthened the hand of old-guard conservatives, known as “dinosaurs,” who oppose Zedillo’s political and economic liberalization.

Several analysts said that, if the party had freely voted for a new leader, it probably would have chosen one of the old guard. “Democracy would have brought a ‘dino’ to the leadership of the party,” Baer said.

Members of the old guard were apparently strong enough to veto Esteban Moctezuma, a prominent reformer and Zedillo ally who had been considered a front-runner for the party job, analysts said.

Palacios will have to try to unify a rudderless party and prepare it for the all-important national presidential election in three years. The party now is so undecided about its direction that some members are even suggesting a new identity, including a name change. The party’s disarray also has only increased as members are wooed by opposition parties that can now offer them alternative routes to power.

As the economy recovers, the PRI could reverse some of its electoral losses, said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. But he predicted that the party will face a daunting task rebuilding itself.

“They’re not going to recover splendidly,” he said. “The question is whether they’re in better shape with this change.”