Tessie Borden
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Mar. 16, 2003 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - Mexico's governing political party and the powerful opponent it defeated three years ago with the election of Vicente Fox are both regrouping after a week in which election results and an electoral verdict dealt setbacks to each.
Fox's right-leaning National Action Party, or PAN, is reviewing its strategies after March 9 elections in Mexico state, the nation's most populous, which could indicate how it will do in crucial midterm congressional elections in July.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the center-left force that ruled Mexico for 71 years before Fox's election and now stands in the opposition, is fighting a ruling by a fiscal committee of the Federal Electoral Institute, the country's electoral authority.
The committee imposed a $91 million fine on the PRI over claims that it siphoned millions of dollars from the national oil company's union coffers to the failed PRI presidential campaign of 2000. The decision was ratified Friday by the full electoral institute. The PRI must pay the fine or lose its party certification, the committee said. But if upheld, the fine could scotch the PRI's ability to wage future campaigns, said Roberto Madrazo, national party president.
Quest for majority
Although it won the presidency in 2000, the PAN never has had a majority in
Congress, and that has hampered Fox's initiatives, most notably an indigenous
rights law, a tax reform measure and a drive to partly privatize Mexico's energy
industry.
Congressional power now is divided among the PRI, the PAN and the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. Some smaller political groups, including labor and green parties, hold minority seats that sometimes join in coalitions with the three main power brokers on votes.
The midterm elections are considered a report card for Fox and his policies, and his party's ability to gain seats then will determine how successfully Fox can push his plans during the rest of his presidency. The Mexico state elections, deciding 124 mayoral posts and 75 seats in the Legislature of a state with 13 million people and 8 million eligible voters, became a sort of "pre-report card."
"It was important because, in some ways, the election was a laboratory for the three parties to measure the intensity of their campaigns, their strategies, their penetration, their jingles," said Manuel Quijano Torres, a political analyst at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "All of them are going to make adjustments as a result of the March 9 elections."
The PAN lost ground. Thirty-four percent of the municipal posts and 35 percent of the legislative jobs went to the PRI, as opposed to 28 percent and 29 percent, respectively, that the PAN won. The PRD also improved its position slightly.
"This is a very important victory," Madrazo said. "Everything points to a changed scenario."
Fistfights and destruction of voting booths marred the elections in the town of San Salvador Atenco and its environs, where angry residents last summer defeated a federal effort to build an airport on their land.
But the larger signal that the PAN must heed, Quijano Torres said, is that nearly two-thirds of the voters did not bother to come to the polls.
That could be because Mexican voters consider federal elections much more important in a country where the federal bureaucratic machine takes up 60 percent of all government posts, and where it is a popular tradition to appeal to one's representative in Congress to fix whatever problem they have, even if it is outside the lawmaker's purview. In the United States, Quijano Torres said, the federal government makes up only 20 percent of all government jobs.
But another reason for the apathy may be that voters feel that they can trust no one and that their interests are being ignored. Attacks and mudslinging, rather than positive proposals to solve the lack of decent housing, the dearth of good drinking water, and a soaring crime problem dominated the campaign and only reinforced that impression, Quijano Torres said.
The PRI's challenge
Although it made inroads in Mexico state, the PRI did not emerge unscathed last
week. The Federal Electoral Institute, which conducts and regulates elections
in Mexico, ended its investigation of improper financing of the PRI's 2000 presidential
campaign with the decision to fine the party.
Shortly after the elections, allegations surfaced that millions of dollars in pension money belonging to the workers union at Pemex, the state-owned oil company, had been diverted into the campaign coffers of Francisco Labastida, the PRI's candidate.
With its recommendation, the committee concluded that the campaign received about $46 million in improper funds. PRI officials have denied wrongdoing.
Angry at the fine, PRI supporters tried Tuesday to break into the closed-door meeting of the finance committee, and their representative, Rafael Ortiz, told reporters that the committee was taunting a formidable adversary.
"We will mobilize and then they will see what it is to tug on the lion's tail," he said. "It's tremendous, it's something to be very careful about."
The PRI is fighting back with demands that the Attorney General's Office investigate who leaked the allegations to the electoral institute.
Reach the reporter at tessie.borden@arizonarepublic.com.
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