Mexico Ruling Party Hit Again

The world’s longest-ruling party has suffered another chink in its armor, losing the governorship of a small state once considered a bedrock of support, Mexican officials said Monday.

The election in Tlaxcala came at the conclusion of a closely watched political season in which 10 governorships were up for grabs. The races were seen as key indicators of how the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will survive in Mexico’s newly democratic era.

The PRI won the two other major elections Sunday, in northern Sinaloa and southern Puebla states. With those victories, the PRI has taken seven of the 10 governor’s races this year.

Still, analysts were unimpressed. They noted that, even when the PRI won, it was by a smaller margin than in the past. And nearly all the states holding elections this year were PRI powerhouses.

“This is usually the most solid bunch of elections for the PRI,” said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

Competitive elections are still a novelty in Mexico, so the results were scrutinized like tea leaves for signs of where the nation is headed. The PRI had won every governor’s race during the six decades after it was founded in 1929, relying on adroit politics, generous public spending and fraud. It has never lost the presidency.

The most worrisome election Sunday for the PRI was in the tiny state of Tlaxcala, near Mexico City. There, the local PRI split, reflecting the party’s biggest hurdle nationwide: how to unite its squabbling factions in the absence of an all-powerful Mexican president, who in the past handpicked all major candidates.

The PRI has tried to solve the problem by letting the party rank and file choose the candidates. But the winner of Sunday’s election, Alfonso Sanchez Anaya, bolted the PRI before the primary, charging it was rigged by party bosses. He ran on the ticket of the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and three small parties, collecting 45.5% of the vote to the PRI’s 42.9%, with 97% of the ballots counted.

“This is a blow to the democratic tendencies of the PRI,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political scientist at the Center of Investigation and Economic Teaching, a think tank. He said the primary had divided the party, lessening its credibility as a mechanism for choosing candidates.

President Ernesto Zedillo has vowed to drop the traditional practice of dedazo--or “fingering” the party’s candidates--even for the critical presidential election in 2000. But no new procedure has been established to avoid an all-out war between candidates.

Tlaxcala was the second state the PRI lost to the PRD this year. In northern Zacatecas, victory went to a PRI militant who similarly defected to the opposition after being passed over by his party. The PRI also lost the central state of Aguascalientes to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.

In one of Sunday’s other races, the PRI swept to an easy victory in Puebla. With 40% of polling stations reporting, its candidate, Melquiades Morales, had 51%, compared with 39% for the PAN standard-bearer. In the last governor’s race, in 1992, the PRI won with 70% of the vote.

In Sinaloa, PRI union leader Juan S. Millan fought back a challenge from PAN businessman Emilio Goicoechea, winning with 47% compared with 32% for the conservative, with 90% of ballots counted. The PRI won with 56% of the vote in 1992.

While the PRI’s margin of victory has shrunk, the party has surprised analysts who thought it might collapse after losing control of the lower house of Congress last year.

But analysts cautioned that local elections should not be considered litmus tests for the presidential vote.

“The big turkey shoot in 2000 is anyone’s race,” said Estevez.