Crisis in Mexico’s PRI Goes Beyond Factions, Rivalry

The leadership fight engulfing the Institutional Revolutionary Party is the most glaring sign yet that three years after losing power to President Vicente Fox, Mexico’s largest opposition party is still in the throes of an identity crisis.

Known as the PRI, the party controlled Mexico for seven decades until Fox of the National Action Party swept to power in 2000. Ever since, the PRI has been struggling to figure out how to be an opposition party based on consensus rather than divine right.

But the internecine bitterness that erupted Monday after the PRI dismissed Elba Esther Gordillo as its legislative leader shows that the party still has far to go in the search for consensus. Her ouster -- engineered by her former ally and now bitter rival, PRI President Roberto Madrazo -- has damaged the party’s image and hurt his chances of winning the 2006 presidential nomination.

Madrazo’s naming of Emilio Chuayffet Chemor as Gordillo’s replacement has further polarized the party, pitting governors and lawmakers against one another. Gordillo has refused to recognize her replacement, and talk of a party split is in the air. Congress was not in session Friday so deputies braced for a tense week ahead.

“There is a big dispersion and fragmentation of power,” said Jean Francois Prudhomme, a political scientist at the College of Mexico here. “The PRI has not succeeded in replacing the principle of cohesion or the authority of the republic behind it, which was the main basis of its power.”

There is no glee in the Fox camp. The PRI’s disarray leaves the president further from achieving his reform program, stalled in a fractious legislature. Because his party has a minority of seats, he needs to use alliances effectively to get his agenda passed.

“The lack of governability is more now than ever before, due not just to Fox’s missteps but also due to the disarray of the main opposition party,” said Pamela Starr, a public policy scholar specializing in Mexico at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.

The split shows the difficulty PRI faces in reinventing itself. Formerly a hierarchical organization ruled imperiously by the nation’s presidents, the party is trying to recast itself as horizontal and inclusive.

“The PRI was never a real party because it wasn’t born with the goal of achieving power. It was born with power and was always the instrument of the president, who was its real chief,” said political analyst Alfonso Zarate of Mexico City.

The PRI is also trying desperately to recapture its populist credentials, lost under the technocratic regimes of former Presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Ernesto Zedillo, while presenting itself as being in tune with a country struggling to join the increasingly elusive First World.

It’s having trouble on both fronts, said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political scientist at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching here. Organizationally, the party is in disarray, and ideologically it is torn between social priorities and the urgent need for fiscal reforms such as those proposed by Fox.

“This is what happens when a monopolistic party loses power. They have to look for new ways of taking decisions among different kinds of leaders,” Crespo said. “Step by step, the PRI has been doing it, but it creates inevitable divisions.”

The bitterness of the split also stems from the role played by Gordillo, who heads the 1.2-million-member Mexican teachers union, in the election of Madrazo, a former Tabasco state governor, as party president in 2002.

The two formed an alliance with the understanding that Madrazo would get the party leadership and an edge over competitors for the 2006 nomination, while Gordillo would be named the PRI’s legislative coordinator. That job in effect made Gordillo the PRI’s main negotiator with Fox, giving her a stepping stone to bigger things if Madrazo won in 2006.

Gordillo never dreamed she would become a casualty, Crespo said. “Madrazo used her to get to the party presidency. She probably never calculated that he was going to do this to her. She must have thought that Madrazo wouldn’t dare.”

The Madrazo camp has tried to cast Gordillo’s dismissal as a case of misplaced loyalty. Gordillo was perceived by many PRI deputies as too agreeable with Fox in crafting a fiscal reform package, including new value-added taxes. She ruffled Madrazo’s feathers by negotiating without consulting him and other PRI officials, observers said.

“Some of this she brought upon herself,” said Starr of the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Madrazo saw her as negotiating without him. He sensed he was being marginalized. This was a desperation move on his part.”

Gordillo supporters accuse Madrazo of a calculated campaign to remove a potential rival from a position of power, saying that her closeness to Fox had nothing to do with it. Rogelio Hernandez, a political scientist at the College of Mexico, says Gordillo’s removal is “purely circumstantial. But Madrazo certainly took advantage of the circumstances.”

Restoring the PRI’s populist credentials is important to Madrazo, because the current front-runner in the 2006 elections is Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party.

Political analyst Zarate said the Gordillo-Madrazo fight was a train wreck waiting to happen. “This is bad news for the PRI, bad news for the country,” Zarate said. “An uncertainty is growing that reaches and contaminates everything, and that is costing the nation.”