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Mexico
Estados
Unidos Mexicanos (United Mexican States) Last elections: 2 July 2000 Government
of Mexico: Political Parties :
founded / fundado: 1999 address / dirección: Louisiana 113, Col. Nápoles, C.P. 03810 México, DF telephone / teléfono: (52) 5543-8537 / 5543-8540 / 5543-8541 Partido
Acción Nacional (PAN) Partido Alianza Social (PAS) Partido Auténtico de la Revolución de
México (PARM) Partido del Centro Democrático (PCD) Partido
Democracia Social (PDS) Partido
de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) Partido de la Sociedad Nacionalista
(PSN) Partido
del Trabajo (PT) Partido
Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM) Source: Political Database of the Americas - Last Updated/Actualizada: August 16, 1999
Articles: Politics in MexicoSearching for a livelier role
Nov 15th 2001 | MEXICO
CITY
From The Economist print edition Mexico's political parties owe their identities to past conflicts. They are struggling to adapt to a new and freer political order LIFE used to be dull but straightforward for Mexico's three main political parties. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was created in 1929 as the official party of the state and the nation. Its jobs were to unite hundreds of bickering factions from the country's 1910-20 revolution, to be the electoral arm of the government, and to buy popular support through patronage. To the right, the National Action Party (PAN) protested, in the name of Christian democracy, at many of the changes wrought after the revolution, such as those of President Lazaro Cardenas (pictured above), who nationalised oil and distributed land to peasants in the 1930s. On the left, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was formed by Cardenas's son, Cuauhtemoc, to defend his father's ideas, after the PRI's leaders began to adopt many of those of the PAN. All this changed last December, when Vicente Fox of the PAN took office as president. But after 71 years of rule by the PRI (earlier called the PRM), Mexico's political parties are finding it hard to adapt to new roles in an emerging democracy. That is especially so for the PRI, which this weekend holds its first national gathering since its defeat. Having lost power and the presidency, it has lost its main reason for existence. Now the PRI has to work out what else makes it the PRI. Supposedly, the 12,000-delegate convention will do that. The party wants to remain in the middle ground, between the PAN and the PRD. Not surprisingly, the party leaders' favourite phrase is “the third way”. But that conceals a big divide, between those who favour free-market policies and those who blame precisely such policies for the party's defeat. The convention's most important job is to set the rules for a party leadership contest early next year. Since the presidential election, a caretaker leadership has concentrated on keeping the various factions from breaking away. It has been remarkably successful. Not only have predictions of an early split been confounded, but the party has also done reasonably well in the local elections held over the past year. It has lost some governorships and mayors, but maintained an average of over 40% of the votes—more than in the presidential race. Not until there is a new face at the helm can the party set a course for recapturing the presidency. But a leadership contest will also polarise the party, between the old guard and the modernisers. It is then that the losers may split off. Like the PRI, the PRD was soldered together from many bits—social organisations, small leftist parties and PRI defectors. Mr Cardenas came within an ace of winning the 1988 presidential election (fraud is believed to have foiled him). But having been Mexico's main opposition in the early 1990s, the PRD lost that role, first to the PAN and now to the PRI, and has degenerated into squabbling factions. This week, however, the PRD had something to celebrate. On November 11th, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas's son, Lazaro, won the governorship of Michoacan state, a PRI bastion. But, says Kathleen Bruhn, a political scientist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, the win owed less to the party than to the candidate. Mr Cardenas worked hard to unite warring PRD groups in the state. And it helped that his father and grandfather had both held Michoacan's governorship for the PRI. The PRD, too, will choose a new leader early next year. Mr Cardenas's success threatens only to widen the gap between people loyal to his father and their opponents. What may determine the outcome of these faction fights is an underlying change in Mexican politics. Increasingly, voters will judge the opposition parties not so much by the pronouncements of their leadership contenders as by the way their elected officials behave at all levels of government. For the PRD, this means its handful of governors, chief among them Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico city's mayor, who is Mr Cardenas's chief rival in the party. In Congress the party has too few seats—around a ninth of each house—to make much impact. For the PRI, however, the legislature is all-important. It is the largest party in both houses of Congress. Shrewdly, it has co-operated with the government on many bills, blocking only things that matter, such as a tax reform that includes an unpopular proposal to levy VAT on food and medicines. Mr Fox could have tried to split the PRI by negotiating only with certain parts of it, says Ignacio Marvan, a political scientist at CIDE, a Mexico city university. But he has chosen not to, “and that means the PRI has managed to set the agenda despite its own slow decision-making process”. The word in Congress now is that the tax reform will pass this year, but at a heavy price exacted by the PRI. To confuse matters further, Mr Fox's shaky relations with his own party are also partly to blame for his difficulties. Mr Fox won the presidency on the strength of his own personal campaign, with little PAN support. The distrust persists: he did not show the tax reform, his biggest bill so far, to the PAN before sending it to Congress. Communication between them remains patchy and tense. As in the PRI and the PRD, some members of the PAN today wonder what their party is really for.
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