There have been discordant interpretations of the outcome to the Mexican elections of 21 August. Some observers view it as a flop for the Pri (Partido revolucionario institucional), in power for sixty years. Despite winning the elections, the Pri saw the vote for its candidate Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León drop under the fifty per cent mark: it was the first time this had ever happened, since in the past Pri presidential candidates were often almost single contenders.
Other commentators point to the fact that the elections were the most near run in the whole of the Republic’s history: for the first time three candidates stood with a fair chance of success, and the eve-ofelection forecasts even hinted at a possible defeat for Zedillo. In this light, the election result could be seen as a success for the Pri. It not only managed to have its candidate elected but above all it did so to the background of acceptably fair elections, thus improving its credibility at home and abroad.
But to make a balanced assessment we must analyze what was really at stake in the August 21 elections.
Let us first look at some facts and figures. Three main candidates stood at the August 21 presidential elections: the Pri candidate Ernest Zedillo carried the day with 48.87 per cent of the votes; the candidate of the conservative Pan (Partido de acción nacional), Diego Fernandez de Cevallos obtained 26.09 per cent, while the left-wing candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, leader of the Prd (Partido de la revolución democrática) came third with 16.43 per cent of the votes.
The presidential elections were also accompanied by the parliamentary elections which saw a landslide victory for the Pri: of the 298 seats in the Camara de Diputados (at the time of writing two are still vacant), the Pri obtained 268, the Pan 25 and the Prd 5. The opposition did a little better at the Senate since the electoral system has a twofold division of seats: initially the seats are assigned to the first-placed candidate in the constituency, but a certain number of seats are also given to the second-placed candidate. Of the 64 seats assigned using the first method, the Pri won 62 with the remaining 2 going to the Pan, of the second-placed candidates elected there were 22 from the Pan, 9 from the Prd and 1 from the Pri. Then by adding the senators whose term of office had not run out, the composition of the senate is as
follows: Pri 94, Pan 25, and Prd 9.
Significantly, there was a high public turnout, with over seventy per cent of those eligible casting their vote. This figure is much higher than the past average of fifty per cent and goes to show how seriously these elections was taken.
In fact the elections were rather overhyped as the most important in Mexican history. This was not only because the Pri was in danger of losing them, but also because of the background of events of fundamental importance for the country.
These events include Mexican membership of the North American free trade area (Nafta), together with the United States and Canada, introduced on 1 January 1994; the Chiapas peasant uprising which occurred on the same day and had an enormous impact on public opinion and on the Mexican political situation; and finally the shocking assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the Pri presidential candidate, in Tijuana on 6 March.
Along with these key events were a number of other factors attesting to highly volatile situation: the economic reforms introduced by the outgoing liberal-minded president Salinas de Gortari, which turned out to be quite successfully but as yet have not tackled the basic contradictions of a social system with the upper classes fabulously wealthy and the third-world conditions of the rest of the population; the growing importance of the Mexican narcotraffickers (1), whose role is not so much in production as smuggling to the United
States; the climate of political violence, a permanent feature of Mexico which shows no signs of diminishing; the repercussion of a number of crimes never fully explained and clearly connected to the ongoing deep transformations in the country, such as the killing last year in Guadalajara of Cardinal Juan José Posadas and the kidnapping of the most important Mexican banker Harp Helu, a close friend of President Salinas and the key figure in the privatisation process initiated by the President.
Taken together, these factors highlight an extremely complex situation. To understand it we must take a step backwards and see what has happened in Mexico over the past few years.
Mexico has been an atypical case in the framework of Latin American political systems: following the stormy years from 1910 to 1930, the country was characterised by political stability.
The party which inherited the revolutionary legacy was founded by Lázaro Cárdenas (Cuauhtémoc’s father) in the late 1920s. For Europeans the Pri’s very name is a contradiction in terms, but not for the Latin Americans: it associates the revolution with what is apparently the opposite – the institutions. The underlying message in this approach is the transformation of revolutionary demands into a permanent forward motion.
The keystone of the Pri’s electoral success over the decades has been the agricultural reform: the distribution of land to the peasants was the main binding element and through it the party controlled the enormous Mexican rural areas. Land continued to be the property of the state but was entrusted to the campesinos. Around them the Pri built up a system controlling rural areas enabling the party to rule undisturbed without a political opposition until the 1980s. The electoral processes were strictly controlled through various methods: the trade union have always been political and more or less in the Pdi’s pocket, while the armed forces have never had a political role in Mexico and have played a low-profile role on the sidelines in civil society.
Thus the Pri was identified with the state in what was almost a single-party system sheltered from any kind of outside attack.
Naturally within the Pri a number of political families formed, and were often in conflict. But on the whole there was always some basic agreement enabling them to share out the political appointments and the key-posts in the economy. The Pri had absolute control over social life for decades: anyone with other aspirations in Mexico had to come terms and toe the line with this system. The fulcrum of the Mexican political system is the president, who exercises pseudo-royal powers during his six-year term of office. Very significantly, the outgoing president (who can only have one term of office) had the power to appoint the Pri’s candidate for the forthcoming presidentialelections (the so-called dedazo), which was tantamount to appointing his successor.
As far as the economy is concerned, there has always beena widespread presence of the public sector whose many companies stuck to the basic ideological principles of the party. An emblematic example is the public control over the oil sector (Pemex): the sector represents one of the main resources of the country, but Mexico always pursued an independent policy outside of Opec.
The two principal weak points in the Mexican economy were traditional the low influx of foreign capital, impeded by legal difficulties, since for a long time foreign citizens could not own Mexican assets (they were state-owned) and the aforementioned problem of the distribution of wealth between the social classes.
In the 1980s Mexico was by crippled the problem of the external debt: to find a way out of the negative spiral, the government of President De la Madrid launched the first free-market reforms of the economy led by the future President Salinas who at the time held a key position in the Ministry (Secretariat) for Planning and the Budget.
But it was only with the advent of President Salinas, a forty-year old technocrat with a Harvard Ph.d. and a completely different figure from the lumbering dinosaurs ofthe Pri apparatus, that the road to liberalization was definitively taken.
Salinas came to the presidency in 1988 with the background of an excellent economist, a brilliant minister but little clout inside the old families of the Pri. This was no drawback for the new president since one of the two key points in his programme was to break the organic links between government and party as a decisive step towards full democracу; the other key point was of course the liberalization of the economy.
The first great stumbling block for Salinas was his election. Serious doubts were cast on its legitimacy by notorious epіsode: Cárdenas, also a candidate at the time, was leading the count when a spurious electronic fault led to the need for a manual count, which in practice was controlled by the Pri.
In the end Salinas was proclaimed the victor with a tiny majority over Cárdenas, who, however, triumphed in the enormous Distrito Federal (a significant victory given the importance of the Distrito Federal in the overall context of the country): the Pri candidate came out on top thanks to the rural areas, the party’s clientelism and because the massive presence of its militants at the polling booths compared to a much weaker Prd presence greatly undermined the legitimacy of the result.
Thus yet another chapuza (mess) meant that the president’s programme for liberalization and accountability could not have got off to a worse start.
During his presidency, Salinas achieved a number of positive results: from the economic point of view, the privatisation of the banks, the stimulus to investments, the revitalized stock exchange and the basically fairly sound performance of the currency must be set against a worsening balance of payments and a downward trend in the Gdp growth rate. From the foreign policy point ofview, his presidency saw the recent admission of Mexico to the Oecd (more about the Nafta below). The agreement with the Catholic church has been another important result, which has tempered the rather paradoxical excesses of an aggressively secular state in a deeply catholic country (for example, the clergy were not allowed to vote and could not wear their habit in public); and finally even as far as the Pri and its grand families are concerned, Salinas had a number of important successes. In this field his closest ally had been Luis Donaldo Colosio, president of the Pri for four years before being appointed presidential candidate.
But the real turning point for the Salinas administration was the historic agreement on free trade with the United States and Canada (Nafta). This treaty is a fundamental strategic choice for Mexico, which always had very complex relations with its powerful neighbour: or to quote the rather over-used phrase by president Porfirio Diaz, Mexico’s main problem is that it is tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos («as far from God as it is as near to the United States), a vision is shared by many people in the country We could discuss at length the pros and cons of Nafta for Mexico and its two partners,(2) but even when the advantages were only psychołogical, Salinas’s decision is of capital importance: in a world on the road to the global liberalization of trade, principally through processes of regional integration, Mexico has decided to break completely with its dirigiste and protectionist past and take up the challenge of competition, forming with the United States and Cаnada the largest market in the world.
Salinas and his group of United Statestrained technocrats made a choice in keeping with their intellectual background and attempted to followed the way indicated by the Bretton Woods institutions.
But the equation liberalization equals development also needed to have a strong dose of democratization, and above all it needed a democratically elected president with not a shadow of doubt over the fairness of the electoral process.
Colosio, another member of the fortyyears-old group, had the right credentials for the job. Much more a man of the people, he also enjoyed better public relations than the rather aloof Salinas. Colosio’s assassination at Tijuana will probably remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of Mexican history: among the various conjectures is the theory of an internal vendetta in the Pri (Colosio was the former party president), a narco-traffic connection, a combination of the two, or a thousand other possible explanations.
The outcome was Salinas had to make a difficult choice of candidate at the height of the election campaign. In the end he opted for Zedillo, former Treasury Minister and organizer of Colosio’s electoral campaign. Moreover, he was one of the few possible candidates not in government office, and therefore his candidature was in keeping with the Mexican constitution.
A rather uncharismatic forty-two-year old economist, Zadillo had the same kind of background as Salinas and Colosio and therefore suited the requirements of the outgoing president.
But before analyzing the three options offered to the Mexican electorate in the presidential elections, we must consider the Chiapas uprising.
We have already stressed how this revolt had an important impact on Mexican public opinion: the revolt broke out in the southernmost and least developed state in the country with a large Indian community. The reasons for the revolt must be sought for in various factors: the objective underdevelopment of the region, the end of the mirage of land for all (Salinas had in factput an end to this phenomenon), diffidence towards Nafta, seen as bringing few benefits for the southern states and the Mexican Indians’ difficult relations with central power.
The Ezin (Ejército zapatista de liberación nacional) is inspired by the most radical figure in the Mexican revolution – Emiliano Zapata. What drew so much attention the Chiapas incidents was not only the surprisingly well-organized uprising for a country with no great tradition of guerrilla warfare, but above all the striking cry of alarm over the underdeveloped conditions of large sections of the Mexican population and the possible political repercussions in the election year.
The government chose the way of dialogue. And although it did not obtain the rebels support, they did participate in the election, which was an important contribution to legitimating the electoral process.
But let’s look at the three main candidates, whose programmes were not very radically different. All were in favour of Nafta, although Cárdenas pushed for a partial renegotiation. Cevallos insisted on more administrative decentralization to the individual states. Cárdenas promised greater public spending, while Zedillo was more prudent on this point, only hinting at more spending in education and health; Cevallos wanted a more important role for Congress in political life.
The pre-election polls (a novelty in Mexico since previously there had been no point in having them) came very close to forecasting the actual result, but few took them seriously.
But what were the consequences of the election result? Firstly, it must be said that the important test of the fair organization the elections was successfully passed: the national and international observers agreed that, despite a few anomalies the result was basically valid. Thus Zedillo started from a stronger position than Salinas since there could be no doubting that he was a legitimate president. In this sense Cárdenas’ protests seem rather wildly off the mark. He lagged so far behind Zedillo that his complaints are more like clichés than real convictions.
What is surprising was the rise of the Pan to previously unscaled heights. The party always had considerable support in the northern states where the factor of the attractive United States neighbour exercised a fundamental influence. But I feel the new support for Pan came from those convinced of the need for liberalization policies but were less than enthusiastic about the Pri bureaucratic machinery and hoped for a change in the ruling class.
The in some ways unexpected decline of Cárdenas may be seen as a defeat for the traditional populist Latin American left, which in its various forms is basically out of touch with history. The swing away from Cárdenas’s was certainly drastic, although the fact Cárdenas was denied access to the main national television network (Televisa) should not be underestimated. This ban lasted until a new electoral law forced a change in the situation. But in any case the falling off in support for the Mexican left has taken on considerable proportions.
But did the Pri win or lose its own particular battle? The idea of change in continuity sqso dear to the Pri policy-makers seems to have prevailed. Zedillo has already declared he wishes to form a government with people not compromised by the old style of the Pri. Не has also shown a willingness to coopеrate with the opposition parties: these are unheard-of phenomena in traditional Mexican politics and suggest that now the Pri has abandoned its almost single party status it may even lose power.
But the Pri decline was inevitable. Its monopoly in historical terms was redundant. What is important is that the Pri seems to be capable of channeling society’s needs for change in an acceptable way.
Paradoxically Cárdenas’s defeat should be seen in this light: evoking the revolutionary legacy turned out to be an anachronistic decision. In a country beleaguered by contradictions, but where the myth of modernity has made a breakthrough, the traditional ideological values lost ground to new ideas based on liberalism as the key to development.
Although the process of formal democratization seems unremitting and should take place without the Pri necessarily passing to the opposition, the future of Mexico willhinge on the themes of social development and therefore on substantial democratization.
Only if a way is found to redistributing more effectively the benefits of economic growth and to raising significantly the population’s living standards will the present political class survive.
On the other hand, if Mexico remains the country of blatant inequality, the future will inevitably be overcast with doubts.
Notes
(1) On this point, see Le Mexique
confronté à la puissance des narcotrafiquants,
Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1994.
(2) For a study of the advantages and
disadvantages of Nafta see: W. A. Orme
Jr., «Myths versus Facts», Foreign Affairs,
November-December 1993; P. Krugman,
«The Uncomfortable Truth about Nafta»,
ibid; J.G. Castaneda, «Can Nafta change
Mexico?», Foreign Affairs, September-October 1993