PRI’s Woes Lie Within

The soundness of the center left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) recent electoral victories in Mexico are nothing but spectacular. Since 1997, when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the party’s historical leader, won the government of Mexico City, the PRD has been on a roll.

Last year PRD candidates won the elections for governors in the states of Zacatecas and Tlaxcala. This year, Baja California Sur was the prize and is currently disputing the results of the election in the states of Guerrero and Quintana Roo where the voting was extremely tight.

Numerically, the electoral gains of the PRD are impressive. They now govern over 21 million Mexicans, over one-quarter the population of Mexico. A political base like this places them within reach of the presidency in the 2000 elections.

Evidently, numbers and trends do not give us the whole political story in Mexico. Neither do they reflect the depth of the phenomenon nor do they help us understand the reasons why the PRD is gaining ground so rapidly.

Granted, the party’s leadership should be credited for transforming, in barely a decade, what was but a vaguely defined political front into a full-fledged political party. As it stands today, the PRD’s historical figures that were essential at the beginning are now less relevant than the party structures. But to really understand the causes of the PRD’s electoral successes, we should consider also an important external factor: the violent fragmentation of the PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party.

None of the PRD victories, with the exception of its win in Mexico City, resulted from the work done by the PRD base. The party didn’t get more voters because it was able to broaden its appeal. It won in places where the PRI’s party structure was fractured, in states where the different groups within the PRI were unable to unite behind a consensus candidate.

The PRI, it seems, has grown a cancer and as it spreads, the PRD grows healthier. Further more, time is on the side of the PRD and against the PRI, which not only has to come to terms with itself for the upcoming state elections but for the big presidential election upon which its hopes for survival cling precariously.

Curiously, it would seem that inside the PRI nobody seems to realize the risk of their political behavior or how much they need an undisputed and firm leadership. Neither President Ernesto Zedillo, the natural chief of the party, nor Mariano Palacios Alcocer, its national leader, have been able to build a consensus within the party. They have been incapable of putting forth a set of basic rules to avoid conflict within the party. Zedillo and his inner circle want to make us believe that underlying the party’s problem is a clash between hard-liners and democrats. The truth is that the problems they face stem from a lack of political skills in the leadership. Zedillo and Palacios have allowed the party to go astray and now they don’t know how to control the bosses within the party. This is why they are suffering all these setbacks.

Consider the case in the state of Zacatecas. There, the PRI seemed to be grooming Ricardo Monreal to become governor. A gifted speaker, Monreal was charged with carrying either in the Senate or in the Lower House, the government’s most difficult projects. Yet, when the time came to choose the candidate for governor, he was overlooked. The party’s hierarchy chose as its candidate a worn-out politician that was entangled in a myriad of personal problems and turned out to be totally unappealing to the voters. Feeling betrayed, Monreal turned coat and ran under the banner of the PRD and won. A similar story took place both in Tlaxcala and Baja California Sur.

But the real story is not so much the PRD wins but the PRI’s loss. Currently, the PRI has an electoral base of around 35%, merely 7 points above the PRD or the center-right National Action Party or PAN which governs over 32 million people or 36% of the nation’s population.

Recent elections, though, have left a clear lesson: When the PRI is divided, its base dwindles and tilts toward the opposition. That’s just what happened, most recently, in the state of Guerrero where the power struggle within the PRI led to a very contested and yet unresolved election.

The next test for the PRI is coming soon. For the governor’s election in the state of Mexico on July 4, so far the PRI’s traditional groups have been unable to unite and support their already chosen candidate. This is a key election, because it will have an impact on the presidential election for the year 2000. The PRI must recover its homogeneity to present a common front to face the opposition. That is the only way they can remain as a viable competitor. Failure to achieve this unity will bring about a painful first defeat in a presidential election for the PRI. And the question becomes how can the party survive after losing power.