Voters Driven by the Idea of Change

Monday, the sun came up.

Millions of workers crowded into the orange cars of the Metro subway and rode to their jobs. Cars drove along the Periferico, or Outer Belt, and onto the city’s main boulevard, past the Angel of Independence monument where, the night before, Vicente Fox’s supporters celebrated the first victory in 71 years of a presidential candidate who was not from the ruling party.

Nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed.

“The prospect of change is not going to solve the many intractable problems of Mexico,” said Mexican political analyst Denise Dresser. “But it will make them easier to solve.”

Fox’s election and the long coattails that gave his National Action Party, or PAN, the largest delegations in both houses of Congress present him with the opportunity to root out the pervasive interests that have blocked change, she said.

The tremendous power of the Mexican presidency, which has initiated virtually all new laws, parceled out public funds to the states and cities and traditionally used those tools to promote an official party, will pass to an outsider.

Two-thirds of the voters who cast ballots for Fox said their main reason for supporting him was change, compared with just 28% who said they had voted for the candidate himself, according to a joint poll by The Times and Mexico’s Reforma newspaper group.

Some transformation is inherent in the first presidential defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has run the country since the party was founded in 1929:

* The government is no longer synonymous with a single political party.

* Change is no longer synonymous with instability in the minds of voters. In fact, analysts said the clear-cut Fox victory actually prevented turmoil.

* The political process is now indisputably the way to gain power.

Other differences that will become more obvious under a non-PRI administration actually reflect an erosion in the president’s prerogatives that began 15 years ago.

Presidents once pushed legislation through a rubber-stamp Congress and chose governors from among their political cronies. While that is no longer true, the metamorphosis may become more obvious under Fox.

U.S. historian George Grayson pointed out that half of Mexicans now live under opposition party leaders. PAN mayors govern 13 of the country’s 21 largest cities, and this capital has elected two mayors in a row from the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party.

Congress has built, then flexed, its collective muscles as the number of seats held by opposition party politicians has grown. Fox will have to work with his party’s congressional leaders to forge coalitions in order to keep his promise of change, Grayson said.

Many of the changes that Fox must define in the five months before his inauguration can be anticipated from his background as an international business executive and cattle rancher.

“The private sector is going to play a greater role in generating GDP,” or gross domestic product, the total of goods and services that a nation produces, predicted Grayson.

That tendency was already begun by Fox’s PRI predecessors, who sold or closed more than 1,000 state-owned companies. Grayson said the trend will become more accentuated under Fox, as private-sector growth outstrips government influence.

As a result, Mexicans will become less dependent on the government. That will undercut one of the PRI’s most basic strategies for staying in power: patronage, the glue that traditionally holds political machines together.

The most profound changes may be in the PRI itself.

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who once described the PRI as “the perfect dictatorship,” told the newspaper Reforma: “We are going to truly find out what the PRI represents. We will see whether, by becoming the opposition and losing all the power of the state, it deflates and ends up simply an interest group, orphaned from popular support.”

PRI leaders may use the decentralization and revenue-sharing reform measures that opposition parties fought hard to obtain. “Hard-line PRI governors still survive,” said Dresser. “Now they have the capacity to rule their states as personal fiefdoms.”

The PRI may use the states it still governs to rebuild its political base, she said, or leaders could just turn the federal revenue-sharing money into slush funds to support the remaining members of the PRI. While it is clear that the foreign-educated technocrats who have run the party for the past 12 years are now discredited, it is uncertain who will take their place.

What may startle Mexicans most is what does not change. The deepening gap between the rich and poor, the educated and the unskilled, will not easily be bridged, analysts warned. Small, armed groups are likely to continue to threaten from their hide-outs in southern Mexico.

Whether or not the PRI is in power, Mexico will still be Mexico.