Mexican Opposition Hoping to Stand United Against PRI

The Institutional Revolutionary Party has won every Mexican presidential election in the past 70 years, thanks largely to divisions and rivalries among the opposition parties.

Now right- and left-wing parties, including the main ones, are on the verge of deciding whether to forge a rainbow alliance that could fundamentally change the way Mexico is governed. Chances of agreeing to a partnership have grown steadily, to perhaps 50-50.

Many Mexicans still are skeptical that the disparate parties can or want to resolve their disputes over logistics, platforms and personal egos that stand in the way of an alliance. When the proposal first surfaced in February, hardly anybody gave it any chance at all.

But now it is the talk of the country as opposition leaders from eight parties huddle each day in the garden city of Cuernavaca trying to hammer out a coalition that could defeat the PRI, as the party is known by its Spanish initials, in presidential elections next summer.

“It is more than obvious that consummating this alliance could profoundly transform Mexican politics,” political scientist Luis Rubio wrote in the daily Reforma newspaper. “The mere fact that the opposition parties have sat down to negotiate not only an alliance to beat the PRI in the next election but an integral program that would include common positions and a government agenda . . . shows a growing political maturity.”

When veteran leftist leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas first suggested an alliance with the right-wing National Action Party, or PAN, many analysts believed that he was posturing. Cardenas is the leading candidate for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and aligning with the PAN would be anathema to many PRD activists.

But PAN leader Luis Felipe Bravo Mena took up Cardenas’ challenge and agreed to talks, which sputtered along but suddenly took on new urgency this month as the party bosses stared hard at dismal poll numbers.

As in past elections, it appears increasingly likely that a PRI candidate could beat both opposition parties if they again split the anti-PRI vote. But the polls have shown that an alliance candidate could hand the PRI its first presidential defeat since the party was founded in 1929.

The party was created out of the turmoil after the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution. To its foes, the PRI became a corrupt patronage machine designed primarily to ensure its own perpetuity in power.

But attempts at an alliance to beat the PRI could be derailed by a dispute about how to nominate the coalition presidential candidate. Tuesday is the parties’ tentative deadline to conclude the coalition talks and still give themselves time to decide how to choose a joint candidate in the fall. Separately, the PRI is holding its own presidential primary Nov. 7.

The PRD, formed by Cardenas in 1987 when he broke from the PRI, wants a nationwide primary election. The PRD has national organizational reach, although Cardenas has fallen badly in opinion polls.

The PAN is skeptical that a clean and credible national primary could be arranged so quickly and wants the candidate selected by some form of opinion poll. That would favor the PAN’s nominee, Guanajuato state Gov. Vicente Fox, who is the runaway leader in polls for an alliance nominee.

Assuming such obstacles could be overcome, the question of whether an ideologically divided PRD-PAN coalition could govern effectively if it did win the July 2 vote also vexes analysts.

Joy Langston, a political scientist at the Center for Economic Investigation and Teaching, noted that if Fox is the presidential candidate, the PRD could want a leading position in the lower Chamber of Deputies in return. And the PRI could conceivably retain control of the Senate.

“The problem is not so much the electoral alliance but what happens after that,” she said. “The situation could be even more divided than in the U.S., with three parties controlling the three different power centers of the government.”

Langston also noted that the alliance negotiations involve the party elites, “and it’s not so clear that the PRD can convince its members, who are ideologically driven, that they should vote for Fox.”