PRI Reflecting on Its Identity, Path to Future

No one needs a recount to see that the July 2 elections were a disaster for Mexico’s former ruling party, and that its future as a national political force is in question.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is seriously weakened. Its presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, was crushed, and the party suffered losses in Congress. It will have an estimated 103 seats in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, down from 201 seats. In the Senate, its bank will drop to 33 seats from 60.

The party once synonymous with power now faces a perilous period of soul-searching in which it must find a home in the country’s polarized political landscape, or perish.

On the right, the National Action Party, or PAN, lays claim to the presidency, with Felipe Calderon holding a lead of less than a percentage point. The left’s Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has taken to the streets demanding a recount for its candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

An electoral tribunal is weighing whether to recount votes, hold another election or stand pat.

Since 2000, when the PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 71 years, collecting on bets that the party would die has been easy money. Against all odds, the PRI has remained a potent regional and local political force. It controls 17 of 31 governorships and more than half of the nation’s city halls.

But the party this time around has lost its political identity along with its once-dominant role in Mexico’s highly centralized government and budget- setting process.

“The problem of the PRI is in the velocity of its decline and what we have to do to turn it around in the next election,” said Sen. Dulce Maria Sauri, a former PRI president. “We are at a real fork in the road.”

Longtime PRI political operative Mentor Tijerinas struck a more alarmist tone. “The PRI is at its worst moment. It’s at risk of extinguishing itself.”

Among the new directions being discussed is an alliance with the party of the winning presidential candidate, particularly if it is Calderon’s PAN. Under this scenario, Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras, the influential governor of the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon, has proposed that the party cooperate in pushing sweeping changes to energy and fiscal policy that it once worked to block.

“The future of the PRI lies not in unconditional alliances but in intelligent agreements that contribute to the governability of the country,” Gonzalez Paras said in a recent interview.

“What is sure is that in the next few weeks we will see some significant changes in the party, all brought about by the PRI governors,” said Rogelio Hernandez, a political scientist at the College of Mexico in Mexico City.

As well as anyone, Gonzalez Paras knows the extent of the PRI’s defeat last month. In his own economically powerful state, the PRI not only lost control of the state congress and its only federal senator, but it also saw its share of lower-house federal deputies fall to four, from 13.

Evidence that influential elements in the PRI feel similarly about cooperating with the new president was visible in the naming last month of new PRI congressional leaders: Manlio Fabio Beltrones in the Senate and Emilio Gamboa in the Chamber of Deputies. Both are known as deal makers unbound by party orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, Enrique Jackson, a centrist PRI senator whose term is about to expire, is rumored to be the choice for PRI party president. He was in Monterrey last week to lobby for Gonzalez Paras’ support.

But the PRI will have to choose its compromises, warned veteran PRI Sen. Manuel Bartlett Diaz. Efforts to embrace the energy and fiscal reforms proposed by President Vicente Fox touched off emotionally charged resistance among PRI factions during Fox’s term, to end in December.

Such a move, Bartlett said, could leave the PRI without its so-called hard vote -- the peasants, workers and unions that brought it to power and sustained it for decades.

Party leaders and consultants, meanwhile, blame the PRI’s plight on Madrazo, whose inability to articulate a vision or reverse negative voter perceptions of him as untrustworthy and power-hungry left him unable to win the vote of a single state. In the vote-rich Federal District of Mexico City, even the losing PRI candidate for mayor outpolled Madrazo.

The loss of conservative, middle-class supporters to the incumbent PAN may have been expected. But the party also lost its historical base -- left-leaning farmers and union members -- to the PRD, which has been critical of open-market policies exemplified by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The election exposed the PRI’s old electoral formula of a corporatist umbrella over widely divergent political subsidiaries as outdated when the electorate has sharply polarized.

“The PRI tried to be all things to all people when in fact its members are as divided as the Mexican society,” said Arturo Nunez, a former PRI congressman who defected to the PRD and won a Senate seat July 2 in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco.

The party is divided between those who want to follow “the same neoliberal policies of the last 20 years and those of the growing leftist movement throughout Latin America who believe the reduced role of the state has only brought more poverty and inequality,” Nunez said.

Madrazo never could stake out a middle ground between those extremes, making it unlikely he or his faction will have much of a future in a reborn PRI, analysts say.

“The defeat was so overwhelming that they have all lost their influence,” Hernandez said.