Fox Suffers Election Setback

Voters disillusioned with the slow pace of change under President Vicente Fox punished his National Action Party on Sunday, slashing its minority share in a Congress already at odds with his proposals to modernize Mexico.

Three years after Fox broke its 71-year grip on the presidency, Mexico’s once-omnipotent Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, staged a strong comeback, widening its margin as the largest party in the legislature and drumming Fox’s center-right party out of the governor’s office in the wealthy border state of Nuevo Leon.

The leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, was an even bigger winner. Preliminary official returns showed it nearly doubled its presence in the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Mexico’s bicameral legislature.

Both the PRI and PRD capitalized on a stagnant economy and Fox’s failure to deliver on a long list of sweeping promises to make the country richer, safer and less corrupt. Their gains will make it even harder for Fox, who is barred from reelection, to push his reforms through in the second half of his six-year term.

His party, the PAN, will lose at least 44 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the vote-counting federal elections institute announced late Sunday. Seats in the Senate were not up for election.

Fox, tired and somber, later read a brief statement on television, saying the absence of an outright majority for any party obliged them all to work together.

“This is the mandate we received today,” he said.

Presidential aides say that Fox views the turnover in the lower house of Congress as a new opportunity to find common ground with opponents on reform legislation before he leaves office in 2006. The coming realignment within each of the parties could be as decisive as the election results themselves.

Sunday’s elections were the first nationwide referendum on Fox’s performance. Gone was the euphoria of the 2000 vote, when the strapping rancher and former Coca-Cola executive ended the PRI’s monopoly on power and raised high hopes for quick transformation of a country long held back by poverty.

Nearly 6 in 10 voters, out of 64 million eligible, stayed home, the highest abstention rate in decades.

“Nothing has changed,” welder Emmanuel Fragoso, 26, said after casting his ballot in Ecatepec, a working-class suburb of Mexico City. “We expected more democracy, more jobs, more help for the poorest. A new party came in, but they are for nobody but themselves.” A Fox supporter in 2000, he said he voted Sunday for the PRI.

Together, the PRI and PRD hold a majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Both have put up resistance to Fox’s free-market agenda, blocking his initiatives to broaden the tax base, privatize Mexican utilities and overhaul rigid labor laws that discourage hiring and investment.

Of the Chamber of Deputies’ members, 300 are directly elected in local districts. The other 200 seats are distributed according to the percentage of the overall vote won by each party.

The PRI won 34.4% of the overall vote, while the PAN had 30.5% and the PRD 17.1%, election officials said.

But the gap was bigger in the district races. In all, officials said, the PRI would win 222 to 227 seats, a gain of at least 15, and the PAN would get 148 to 158, down from its current 202. And the PRD would jump from 56 seats to at least 93 and perhaps as many as 100. The rest of the seats will go to three smaller parties.

The PRD’s comeback was not as spectacular as its decline in 2000, when it dropped from 126 seats in the lower house. But the returns were a boost for Mexico City’s popular mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is likely to become the PRD’s presidential candidate in 2006.

His party made a strong showing in the capital, winning control of 14 of its 16 borough governments, a net gain of three.

Mexico was under one-party rule longer in the 20th century than any other country, including the Soviet Union. Presidents appointed by the PRI and ratified by the electorate were omnipotent, ruling through compliant, PRI-dominated legislatures.

After its loss of the presidency in 2000, many predicted that the PRI, without its hands on national levers of power and patronage, would fall apart. But Sunday’s results showed that the party, though hurt by factionalism, is very much alive.

Jose Natividad Gonzalez, a Sorbonne-educated lawyer and former federal senator, won the PRI’s biggest prize, the governorship of Nuevo Leon, with 56% of the vote. Fox’s party conceded defeat in the industrial state, which it had controlled for six years, and in the mayor’s race in Monterrey, the state capital.

But in the central state of San Luis Potosi, where the incumbent PRI governor feuded with the party’s central leadership over the choice of a candidate, the party was losing the statehouse for the first time. Exit polls showed businessman Marcelo de los Santos Fraga, of the PAN, the apparent governor-elect.

The PAN was holding on to the statehouse in Queretaro, while the PRI was expected to remain in control of Campeche, Colima and Sonora, according to exit polls.

Voting was relatively orderly. In San Salvador Atenco, outside Mexico City, protesters closed some polling stations with threats against electoral workers. Zapatista rebel sympathizers sacked voting booths and burned ballots in the southern state of Chiapas. Two voters were shot and wounded there.

Fox’s party campaigned on the slogan “Take the Brakes Off Change,” blaming the PRI and other opponents for stalling his economic reforms.

But the race was marked less by issues that touch voters’ lives than by disputes over Fox’s defense of his party.

As an opposition leader, Fox had faulted the PRI for using the presidency, public funds and television time to support its candidates; as president, he was on TV as much as 85 minutes a day during the campaign, defending his record against the PRI’s attacks.

Fox halted those messages in mid-June at the request of the Federal Election Institute.

A small, new party, Mexico Posible, injected substantive issues into the race by advocating abortion rights and same-sex marriage. That provoked denunciations from Roman Catholic pulpits and, in turn, a government warning to the church to stay out of politics. Mexico Posible got 1.1% of the vote.

The $500-million cost of the taxpayer-financed campaign, which seemed to cover every lamppost, outdoor wall and billboard, became a campaign issue itself. In a nation where 6 million people live on less than $1 a day, more than half the population found the campaign “ostentatious,” a poll published Friday in the newspaper Reforma said.