‘Rebirth’ Proposed for Mexico’s PRI

Efforts to revive Mexico’s once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party gained momentum this week as a progressive faction called for the party to abandon its name and logo and be born again as a new political force.

Half a dozen senior figures of the PRI, as the party is known--including former party chief Genaro Borrego and academic Agustin Basave--began lobbying to re-create it as a traditional social democratic party. That brought into the open a fierce internal debate about what must be done for the PRI to recover from its drubbing by Vicente Fox in July’s presidential election.

The new movement, which calls itself Rebirth, hopes to win consensus at the party’s general assembly in November. The initiative calls for the PRI to abandon its traditional dependence on social sectors such as peasant farmers and union members and instead campaign for the support of individual voters.

Such drastic surgery will certainly face opposition. PRI sectors that fear a loss of influence will probably make their own proposals in the coming months, as will likely rival renewal movements.

The soul-searching within the PRI and the direction chosen at the November assembly will shape what kind of opposition Fox must deal with during his six-year term. And the choices will determine whether the PRI, which also has lost key gubernatorial races and faced other crises in recent months, recovers.

For seven decades, the PRI dominated Mexican political life through its iron grip on the presidency. Fox galvanized a groundswell of public sentiment in favor of tossing out what he called an outmoded, authoritarian, corrupt political force, and the PRI’s loss was as shattering for the party as the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Eastern Europe’s Communist parties.

The PRI still controls nearly two-thirds of Mexico’s state governments and many municipalities. But over breakfast Friday with a few foreign correspondents, Borrego and Basave argued that the party is beyond reform.

“We start from the premise that the PRI was created for a country that no longer exists,” Basave said. “Ours is the most radical proposal . . . in that it proposes not a reform, not a renewal, much less a restoration, but a new political party.”

The group’s platform is based on promoting youth involvement and a new structure built around elected municipal, state and federal party councils.

Basave, a former federal congressman with a political science doctorate from Oxford, said polls indicate that the PRI’s support has fallen to between 15% and 20%. And he expects the party to lose at least three of the four gubernatorial elections scheduled this year.

“The PRI as it is has no cure, it is fatally wounded, and we have to practice euthanasia,” he added.

Borrego, a federal senator and former governor of Zacatecas, said resistance to change will come from those who accuse the technocrats within the PRI, including former President Ernesto Zedillo, of having adopted too strict a neoliberal economic policy. He said opposition will also come from political sectors such as the peasantry, “which seem to us to be an anachronism.”

Since the 1930s, the PRI has built up these sectors as support columns in return for government assistance and party positions.

George W. Grayson, a professor at the College of William and Mary and an expert on Mexican politics, said in a telephone interview that the new movement on its own has little chance of determining the PRI’s direction. He said the group will need to recruit support among PRI governors, now a key force in the party in the absence of the traditional power broker, the president.

Grayson said Borrego “is a person of substance. The problem is he’s always kind of walked to the water’s edge but never jumped in. Maybe this is a sign that there is impetus, that he is serious about using his contacts, his talent, his ability to communicate, to try to crystallize support within the PRI.”

Mario Velazco, editor of the party’s internal newspaper, La Republica, said: “It is very healthy that this group is making varied proposals to change the model of the PRI, even to the name and ideology. But they are going to have to define what they mean by social democracy.”

He said a European-style center-left party might exclude some centrist Mexicans who now fit within the PRI. And he said that although the existing PRI sectoral structures aren’t perfect, they provide significant support and will not be jettisoned easily.

The party’s general secretary, Sergio Garcia Ramirez, is steering the party toward the November assembly. He said in a telephone interview: “We have to accustom ourselves to an intense internal debate, especially in this phase leading to the general assembly when all the diverse points of view are being heard with freedom and respect.”

The assembly, the party’s 18th, will include about 10,000 elected delegates, according to a party statement.

“I believe we already have a very different PRI from what we had a few months ago,” Garcia said. “Structurally, the president is no longer a PRI-ista, so we need to find different forms of making decisions in the party and democratic forms of running the party.”

Jose Antonio Crespo, a political commentator, wrote Friday in the newspaper El Universal that the Rebirth movement seeks to regain power in a new guise, just as some former Eastern European Communist parties did. But Crespo said most PRI militants will be reluctant to abandon the name and logo of the party that sustained them for so many decades.