Fox Burned His Own Brand on Campaign Trail

President-elect Vicente Fox turned Mexican history upside-down by mixing a rancher’s tenacity with innovative political marketing honed during his years as a Coca-Cola executive.

Fox broke every rule of Mexican politics as he fought his way to national prominence and finally, in a landslide victory Sunday, ended the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s seven decades of unbroken presidential rule.

How he beat the PRI says a lot about how Fox may govern Mexico.

During the campaign, Fox was often open about his strategy.

“At first, we wanted to win recognition that we were serious, that this wasn’t a game, that the PRI could be defeated. This was a barrier that we had to knock down,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in May. “And today Mexicans, after 70 years, believe that at this moment we can defeat the PRI. This is our great victory.”

His campaign repeated constantly that the PRI really could lose and that change was possible in Mexico. An exit poll conducted by The Times and the Reforma newspaper group Sunday showed that he was convincing. Two-thirds of Fox voters cited change as their main reason for voting for Fox.

Analyzing the factors behind Fox’s victory, pollster Daniel Lund of polling company MUND said Monday: “There was a break with the sense of the inevitable. Fox cut the Gordian knot of ‘the PRI always wins.’ ”

Anecdotes from the balloting Sunday bear out that contention.

In Puebla, Mexico’s fourth-most-populous city, 64-year-old Maximina Lopez, a middle-class homemaker, was defiantly in favor of Fox. “There has been so much corruption for the last 70 years that we have to vote for a change,” she said.

Fox also broke new ground in campaign tactics, reflecting his personal experiences. Although he grew up on a remote ranch in arid Guanajuato state--his cowboy boots are a trademark--he also studied business in Mexico City and rose from route driver to director for Mexico and Central America in a 15-year career with Coca-Cola, where he was known as a marketing specialist.

As if he were on a branding operation, Fox stayed on the presidential campaign trail for a full three years, starting in July 1997, while he was governor of Guanajuato.

He behaved rudely toward his foes, and he made fun of himself--anything that would win him name recognition, which rose to an unprecedented level for an opposition candidate.

Mexican opposition candidates always battled to get attention because of government domination of the media, Fox noted last spring to an audience of Hispanic-American journalists. This time, he exploited the greater independence of Mexican media and broadcasters to get his message across.

“We decided to take control of the timing, the issues and the rhythm of the campaign, because we are not in a regular election, we are not in a country that has a democracy. We are facing a monopoly of 70 years,” he said then.

The PRI didn’t help itself, either. Carlos Alazraki, an advertising guru, said Fox’s job was made easier by the errors of PRI candidate Francisco Labastida’s ad campaign. Alazraki, who was behind the almost-successful challenge of Labastida by Roberto Madrazo in the PRI primary in November, said Labastida’s marketing team “did the worst job I’ve ever seen in my life.”

The PRI attacked Fox viciously for his various contradictions, real or manufactured. But “negative ads don’t work in Mexico. Especially when you have a close election, you should never in your life criticize the opposition,” Alazraki said.

While Fox’s political advertising was hardly memorable, “what Vicente had was a steady campaign, speaking of one thing--change, change, change. And people bought the ticket,” Alazraki said.

Fox also was more innovative on the organizational front. Instead of relying on his staid National Action Party, or PAN, for support, he built an entire parallel network, called Friends of Fox, made up of more than 4 million members. That gave him extra organizing muscle, but it also put him at odds sometimes with the center-right PAN, whose leadership was always skeptical of the rough-edged, 6-foot, 5-inch Fox.

Jorge Castaneda, a prominent left-wing academic who became a key Fox advisor, said the candidate knew that the PAN could give him about 25% of the vote--but he needed 45% to win. So he needed to take votes from both the PRI and the third major faction, the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, whose candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, ran a poor third.

“The extra 20% Fox needed had to come from PRI and PRD voters,” Castaneda said. “So Fox had to adopt a program that was palatable to the PRI and PRD and surround himself with people who were acceptable to those parties.”

Fox recruited a cadre of intellectuals who may have disagreed with some of his policies but who were determined to wrest power from the PRI. He honed the tactic of drawing in ideologically disparate followers while he was Guanajuato governor. There, for instance, he appointed a finance minister from the PRI. He has promised to make his national Cabinet equally representative.

Fox’s most important characteristic may be his tenacity. His unbending nature fuels an ability to charge forward relentlessly. But it also annoys political opponents, who find him inflexible.

“The problem with Vicente is his authoritarianism,” said Martha Lucia Micher, a PRD leader in Guanajuato who lost the mayoral race Sunday in the city of Leon. “He thinks change is symbolized and represented in himself, at the expense of institutions.”

But Fox even turned his stubbornness into a campaign virtue. For example, he was widely criticized in the media for his seemingly childish inflexibility during a live television exchange with the other two major candidates. In a formal debate a few days later, he exploited it, citing his stubbornness as the quality needed to beat the PRI.

Before the vote, he described his strategy: “The citizens want to see leaders with character, firmness, who are capable of knocking down a party dictatorship. I would take as examples the struggles of [South Africa’s Nelson] Mandela or [Poland’s Lech] Walesa who, facing an authoritarian government, had to fight in the streets, in the countryside, in the workplace, to bring down a dictatorship.”

Comparing himself to Mandela and Walesa seemed inappropriate to some critics, but it reflected Fox’s brazen challenge to the institution that controlled much of Mexican life through most of the century.

“I think what’s important about the election is, finally, Mr. Fox,” said political scientist Federico Estevez. “This is the guy who broke open the mold. He thoroughly Americanized presidential politics by throwing his hat in early, running media campaigns, inspiring or scaring others into doing the same [and] basically forcing his party establishment to take a back seat.”

In victory, Fox again invoked his stubbornness.

“This great day has finally arrived,” he told a throng of supporters Monday, “because of our perseverance, our tenacity, in building a real democracy [and] opening the door to the possibility of a future full of hope for our country.”

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More on the Vote

* STARTING AFRESH--A look at some of the changes that could occur under the new regime. A10

* U.S. OPTIMISTIC--The Clinton administration hailed Mexico’s “triumph of democracy.” A10

* MARKETS GAIN--Mexico’s main stock index rose 6.1%, and the peso jumped 2.8% against the dollar. C1