The Withering Away of a Political Party

Ricardo Monreal thought Zacatecas was in the bag.

A long-time stalwart of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Monreal had done everything the party had asked of him. Before serving as vice-coordinator of the party’s faction in the Chamber of Deputies, he had been senator, congressman and party leader in his home state. Plus, he was one of the most popular politicians in the north-central state of Zacatecas, a PRI stronghold. When the party officially began, in January, to look for a candidate to run for governor, Monreal figured he was a shoo-in.

But midway through the selection, party superiors unexpectedly blocked his way. So, on Feb. 5, Monreal and 5,000 of his supporters resigned from the PRI. Soon after, he allied himself with a coalition of opposition parties, led by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which suddenly sees a victory in Zacatecas as a real possibility.

To many Mexicans, the Monreal melodrama is another tedious episode of infighting among the country’s political elite. But, in a larger sense, the Monreal saga is of transcendent importance for what it says about the PRI and its future.

The PRI has not clutched and crumbled overnight, as did ruling parties in Eastern Europe, under the pressures of democratization. Instead, its monopoly on privilege and power has slowly eroded as each new wave of change rolls across Mexico’s political landscape. Last year, the party lost Layda Sansores, a senator and daughter of a PRI founder, who resigned in the state of Campeche to run for governor under the PRD banner. In Queretaro, Jose Ortiz quit the PRI to run for governor against his own brother, Fernando. Enrique Gonzalez, one of the PRI’s most important left-wing ideologues and once governor of Tabasco, is now a PRD senator. Former Atty. Gen. Ignacio Morales Lechuga probably will run for governor of Veracruz as a PRD member.

Many lesser known priistas have also bolted the party. One thousand young PRI members resigned on March 1 and joined the Party of the Democratic Center (PCD) formed by another ex-priista, Manuel Camacho Solis, who was Mexico City mayor under Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Another 10,000 members in Veracruz recently quit, upset at the way the party is imposing on them the gubernatorial candidacy of Miguel Aleman Velasco.

These are unsettling--perhaps alarming--developments for the PRI. For decades, the party was the world’s master at maintaining both power and a democratic veneer. It controlled virtually all facets of Mexican political life, tolerated dissent, to a degree, ceded ground when it had to and used violence only as a last resort. Its success, as well as its current descent, has much to do with its origins.

The PRI, formed in 1929, was founded on the paternal arrogance of the time, but one that jived with 500 years of Mexican tradition: The belief that an elite, operating under an all-powerful president in a far-off capital, could best run the country’s political and economic affairs at every level. The party was a big Mexican tent, with enough room to accommodate almost every person and way of thought. It was born to administer power, not to fight for it. In a country in which the first 100 years of independent history roiled with caudillos, emperors, ephemeral constitutions and a revolution, the PRI was a pretty good idea: It was a vehicle through which the struggle for power could take place peacefully.

All of which meant it lacked the one thing most common to every political party: an overarching ideology. Its ideology was whatever the sitting president happened to think it should be. At various times, its authoritarian brethren posited ideologies based on a master race and a proletarian dictatorship, accompanied by the iron fist to keep people in line.

But the PRI quietly found a more efficient way to manage humans: It bought them off. As a powerful government in a poor country, this wasn’t hard to do. It offered a candidacy, a piece of land, a construction contract or a million other ways a government has to co-opt a poor people.

The PRI survived because it offered loyal members a turn at the public trough and the promise to be left alone while they broke the law. It even jerry-built elections every six years to buy off U.S. and international opinion, which proved as willing to go along with the scam as any provincial bureaucrat.

There is a healthy body of Mexican opinion that holds the PRI was once necessary to hold the nation together. But a number of developments have made the party seem increasingly in the way of progress.

After 20 years of economic crisis, Mexico no longer has the resources for the PRI to buy off everyone who requires it. The corruption and outlandish behavior of the priista political elite, furthermore, has disgusted most Mexicans. For them, the 1994 murders of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and party president Francisco Ruiz Massieu merely highlighted the decadence into which the party had fallen. No longer was the party a vehicle to resolve differences peacefully. Finally, Mexicans increasingly show signs of not submitting, of not settling for a tired party line--of breaking, in essence, with more than 500 years of tradition and, for once, questioning authority.

Years ago, Monreal would have shut up and, as they say in Mexican politics, disciplined himself. Priistas, in true Mexican fashion, have, until recently, been famous for disciplining themselves before power. Holding one’s peace and waiting for the next opportunity was the only smart move in a one-party state.

But the rise of political competition has forced changes. The center-right National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD are no longer hamstrung by the state-party apparatus. In the last three years, as the electoral system has become cleaner, the PRI has lost many elections. As a result, the PRI is no longer perceived as a guaranteed path to power. As such, there is less reason to belong to it.

So priistas are leaving, though they’re usually careful to accompany their exit with a lot of high-minded talk about democratic change and how the party hasn’t kept pace with the times. This being a year in which 10 governorships will come up for election, the PRI will probably lose a few more well-known members like Monreal and, who knows, perhaps thousands more local cadres.

The former priistas are joining the PRD and the PAN, which seem better poised to do what the PRI never had to: engage in electoral battle. The PRD, especially, has welcomed the priistas. Many of its major candidates and its president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, are ex-priistas.

This has stimulated some partisan self-examination. At the PRD convention later this month, how and whether to absorb more ex-priistas, especially those who were once antagonists like Monreal, will be on the agenda. Lopez Obrador was attacked recently by egg-lobbing PRD members in Yucatan who, angered at appointments of ex-priistas to important posts in that state, accused him of turning the party over to the ruling party.

The PRI’s dissolution will continue to be slow, with members trying to look dignified as they run for cover. This process may take many years, since old habits die hard and the party’s hold on poor rural areas is unquestioned.

Still, what can the PRI do? For starters, it must devise an ideology to attract people, since its control of the public trough is less and less. This will not be easy, since its opponents have staked out much of the political spectrum with far more credibility.

The irony is that in a world in which ideologies supposedly have died, the PRI likely will keep fading away because it does not have one.