Mexico’s Fox Faces a New Set of Challenges

With his landslide presidential victory, Vicente Fox broke the legendary grip of the world’s longest-ruling party. But can he actually govern this country?

Most analysts agree that Fox’s decisive victory a week ago Sunday gave him a strong mandate, and he has moved quickly toward reconciliation with the defeated Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

But when he takes office Dec. 1, Fox will still face a set of complex challenges, ranging from more independent unions to a feisty Congress to potential splits within his own disparate web of supporters.

“We now pass from an agenda with an electoral focus to an agenda that must have democratic governability as its focus,” Jose Woldenberg, chief of the independent Federal Electoral Institute, said in Friday’s Reforma newspaper.

One formidable challenge is the disarray engulfing the defeated PRI, which embraced nearly every sector of Mexican society during its 71-year reign through interlocking allegiances with everyone from union members to artists to peasants.

The remnants of the PRI won’t be eager to cede control over pork-barrel patronage, and peeling the party away from the systems of government could get messy in the months ahead.

“The PRI-state tie, in which you could use the two words interchangeably, has come to an end,” said Roderic Ai Camp, a professor at Claremont McKenna College who has studied Mexico since 1966. “This has got to change a mentality that has prevailed for so long, and it is a healthy change, but it will produce some rocky moments.”

Fox, a 6-foot-5 former rancher and Coca-Cola executive, won only 43% of the vote, making him the first modern Mexican president to be elected by less than a majority. And although his conservative National Action Party, or PAN, made enormous gains in Congress, it still will be second to the PRI in the Senate and short of a majority in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies.

What’s more, the PRI’s bitter infighting in the wake of its humiliating defeat could make it harder for Fox to build the alliances he will need to govern effectively. Some even wonder if the PRI will break up into regional power bases like those that thrived during the Mexican Revolution.

The PRI still runs 20 of 31 states as well as nearly 1,400 of the 2,427 municipalities in the country. But if the postelection turmoil persists in the party, it could leave the PRI fragmented and dependent on local bosses. A fight for the national leadership could take months to resolve.

“Hard-liners still survive among the PRI governors,” said Denise Dresser, a political scientist based at the Pacific Council on International Policy at USC. “Now they have the capability to rule states as personal fiefdoms.”

The PRI was formed by then-President Plutarco Elias Calles in 1929 precisely to end internecine battles for dominance and to ensure a quiet succession from one PRI leader to the next.

Tensions are inevitable as Mexico dismantles a system in which everything from street vendor sites to taxi licenses depended on PRI loyalty. But the party’s influence could decline more abruptly than anyone has imagined, said political analyst Alfonso Zarate at Grupo Consultor Interdisciplinario of Mexico City. The PRI’s loss of presidential power immediately deprives it of the perks it has delivered to its constituents.

“There is a possibility that the PRI might decide to assume the role of a tough, intransigent opposition toward the Fox government,” Zarate said. “But this possibility is reduced given that the PRI has been a state party and [that] once the PRI loses the presidency, it loses its strength over the sectors that were part of the PRI.”

He noted, for example, that the Mexican Workers Confederation, known as the CTM, and the National Peasants Confederation “stopped having real power a while back--they are empty shells, they have lost contact with their bases”--but they nonetheless retained their political power within the PRI. “Now, without the support of the state, they don’t have the power to maintain an important role.”

For several analysts, a more serious challenge to a Fox government could come in the form of more genuinely independent unions that might emerge in the post-PRI era.

Many PRI unions have been criticized as being shills for the government rather than defenders of workers’ rights. Once the unions are able to shed their dependence on the government, they may well become more willing to stage strikes for higher wages.

“For the first time, there’s no dependency relationship between the state and these organizations,” said Claremont McKenna’s Camp. “They will become more autonomous and will represent the interests of rank-and-file members. There is going to be conflict, and people have to expect that, because that is what democracy is about.”

Raul Trejo, a labor analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said he doubts that the PRI leadership will be instantly booted from the public servants union and other major unions.

“The PRI could revitalize the unions as the voice of the opposition against Fox,” Trejo said.

“What is clear is that whether they come from the PRI or other parties, new union leaders will emerge and they will have to behave like real leaders, pressuring employers for more wages and benefits to keep member support,” Trejo added.

Overlaying the current dynamics is the fact that unions in Mexico, as nearly everywhere in the world, are losing membership and power. “There is no consensus,” Trejo said, adding that membership in Mexico has declined to as low as 3.5 million, down from 5 million in 1980.

“The new situation has caused a great disconcertedness. Like the rest of society, the unions don’t know what the behavior of the new president will be,” he said. “They will have to wait and see how Fox works.”

Other areas of political gridlock could arise within government.

Some columnists have speculated that the 1-million-strong public employee work force, which has its own potent union, might refuse to accept changed ways of doing business and thus deny Fox any policy victories. There’s even the concern that the outgoing PRI government could pillage federal assets such as cars and computers, or remove compromising files.

That is what Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the longtime leftist leader, says happened to him after he was elected the first opposition mayor of Mexico City in 1997. Cardenas ran a poor third in the presidential race, certainly in part because voters thought he had achieved little during his stint as the capital’s mayor.

Fox has moved deftly to defuse such a threat, assuring all public servants that their jobs are safe and that he doesn’t intend to remove any state employees below Cabinet level without cause. He repeated that pledge in a postelection circular to all government departments last week.

In an interview Thursday in the daily La Jornada, Fox said the PRI’s internal struggles could prove healthy, but he admitted that the worst-case scenario was that “some group might want to try to harass both the current government and the incoming administration. I repeat to PRI-istas, to their governors, that they have nothing to worry about.”

Another potentially disrupting factor for Fox could come from his own team. He had won the support of a group of leftists, intellectuals and artists who shared only their desire to end the PRI’s reign. Now Fox needs to manage them. Just a few days after the election, there was already grumbling that he was excluding some of those supporters, such as ex-PRD leader Porfirio Munoz Ledo, from his inner-circle meetings.

Still another arena for potential problems is in the link between the executive and legislative branches. According to the latest available estimates, the first PAN president will face a divided Congress in which his party holds just 223 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and just 53 seats in the 128-seat Senate, compared with 58 for the PRI.

Columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez, writing in the Milenio daily newspaper, noted, “A good part of the reforms that Fox proposes must first pass through Congress to become law, and if it does not have legislative backing, the democratic fiesta could quickly become a nightmare of governability for the country.”

In the past, the PRI managed to strike accords with the PAN to get key legislation passed, but with the PRI in disarray, such alliances are not a given. And the third significant player, Cardenas’ center-left Democratic Revolution Party, has declared publicly that it will not join any alliance with Fox’s PAN.

Analyst Zarate said he believes that the PAN still will find enough legislators from small parties to cobble together support for key bills. He even speculated that some PRI legislators will declare themselves independent when Congress convenes Sept. 1 and will align themselves with the PAN.

“I truly believe that the guarantee of governability is going to rest with the capacity of Fox to generate good results in economic terms,” Zarate said. “And he has given signs in his first statements that he is a mature and flexible politician. He is seeking concord, not vendettas. If the PRI feels cornered, it will take swipes, but if Fox gives space to the losers, he is on the road toward governability.”