PRI Leads Tabasco State Vote

Mexico’s former ruling party appeared to have ended an embarrassing string of electoral defeats Sunday, taking a solid lead in an unusual governor’s race in the southern state of Tabasco.

Manuel Andrade, candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was leading his main foe, Cesar Raul Ojeda of the left-of-center Democratic Revolution Party, by a seemingly insurmountable margin.

Just before midnight, the state election commission reported that with 82% of the vote in, Andrade had 50.5% to 46% for Ojeda.

As news of Andrade’s apparent victory spread, PRI supporters poured into the streets of Villahermosa, the Tabasco capital, in noisy celebrations.

The election was a repeat of balloting held in October in which Andrade beat Ojeda by just 7,300 votes. In December, the Federal Electoral Tribunal annulled that election on the grounds that the PRI, which has governed Tabasco for more than seven decades, had engaged in electoral fraud that fatally undermined the fairness of the vote.

That was the first such judicial override of a high-level election in Mexico. Civic groups hailed the order as evidence that old-fashioned election fraud would no longer be tolerated, thanks to electoral reforms adopted during the 1990s.

But the PRI sought to capitalize on the ruling as a sign of unfair interference with the voters’ will. And Tabasco voters Sunday seemed to agree, as Andrade’s margin of victory appeared likely to be substantially higher than it was in October.

Mexico’s two television networks, Televisa and Azteca, both had Andrade ahead of Ojeda by about 52% to 45%.

Since its 71-year grip on the presidency ended with Vicente Fox’s July 2000 victory, the PRI has suffered a series of losses in major state races. The most important defeat occurred last year in Chiapas, and the PRI lost in Yucatan this year.

Those defeats ended the party’s absolute control over southern Mexico, which had remained a bastion of PRI support even as states in central and northern Mexico opted for either the Democratic Revolution Party or Fox’s center-right National Action Party.

The southern states tended to be dominated by old-style PRI politicians, such as Yucatan’s Victor Cervera Pacheco, known for their mastery of patronage and political gifts but accused by foes of orchestrating electoral abuses.

The PRI’s apparent revival in Tabasco, therefore, gives the party a lifeline in its current attempt to transform itself into a modern political party capable of remaining a national force.

The Tabasco outcome also seems all but certain to be a boost for the outgoing Tabasco governor, Roberto Madrazo, himself considered one of the PRI’s old-style “dinosaurs.” Madrazo was badly tainted when the first election was overturned. The ruling found, among other irregularities, that the state-owned television station had heavily favored the PRI candidate.

Sunday’s showing by Andrade, a Madrazo protege, puts Madrazo on the path to take over the leadership of the PRI at the party’s national assembly in November.

Joy Langston, a political analyst at the Center for Economic Teaching and Research, a Mexico City think tank, said of the vote, “The most important consequence is that the PRI has stopped its losing streak.”

But she noted that even this time around, opposition parties accused the PRI of old-style abuses and that those charges are certain to result in fresh complaints to the electoral tribunal.

“Taken as a whole, the recent governors’ elections have been a disaster for the PRI,” Langston said. “And while Tabasco stops the avalanche of losses, it’s not going to fix the fundamental problems that the PRI faces.”

Federico Estevez, an analyst at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, said Madrazo had shown himself the only PRI leader apparently capable of ensuring a party victory since Fox’s election last year.

Estevez said Sunday’s result will make it very difficult for any other PRI leader to defeat Madrazo in November.

But Jorge Zepeda Patterson, a columnist for El Universal newspaper, wrote Sunday before the voting that the PRI would end up the loser even if Andrade won.

Zepeda argued that “a victory by Roberto Madrazo would constitute a defeat in terms of the much-needed renewal of the PRI. [It] will facilitate the ascendance of a PRI faction of the old school.”

Most observers described the election as cleaner than the October vote, particularly in terms of the more balanced coverage by the state broadcasting system.

But Langston noted that the PRI’s tactics “at street level . . . were those of the PRI circa 1952.” In response, she said, the Democratic Revolution Party, known as the PRD, was far more aggressive in countering alleged dirty tricks than in other recent elections.

An indirect loser in Sunday’s vote was the Mexico City mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is a Tabasco native and aspirant to the national leadership of the PRD.

Lopez Obrador was beaten by Madrazo for the Tabasco governorship in a tainted 1994 election and has been stalking his foe ever since.

A PRD victory Sunday would have been a major boost for Lopez Obrador’s bid for national status.