Salinas Leads but He Has Only 47% : PRI Share in Partial Count Would Be Mexican Ruling Party’s Lowest Ever

MEXICO CITY —  Government candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, self-declared winner of Mexico’s presidential battle, released election returns Friday that showed him leading his rivals with 47% of the vote--a figure that, if it stands, would be the lowest in the history of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

The release of partial returns was evidently aimed both at quieting charges that the vote was fraudulent and speculation among Mexicans that perhaps Salinas did not win at all. Salinas said the count was from the Federal Election Commission even though the government had said that official results would not be announced until Sunday. The vote took place Wednesday.

Reflects ‘Real Votes’

“These results reflect real votes of the nation,” Salinas told reporters at one of his campaign headquarters. He added that he was undisturbed by the small harvest of ballots. “The results that we have now ratify pluralism in the country and a new reality,” he said.

A Salinas aide said: “Anyone who says that Salinas did not win is a liar.”

The PRI, as the ruling party is known, has ruled Mexico for six decades. Until this campaign, PRI presidential candidates had never received less than 70% of the vote. Salinas has already admitted that the vote represents the end of Mexico’s modern one-party political system.

According to the figures released by Salinas, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a former PRI politician who mounted a strong challenge against his old party, was receiving nearly 27% of the vote. Manuel J. Clouthier, candidate of the conservative National Action Party, took 20%. Two minor candidates had small percentages.

In all, 2.1 million ballots were cast for Salinas, 1.1 million for Cardenas and 925,000 for Clouthier. The tally represented nearly a quarter of Mexico’s 55,000 precincts.

Computer Breakdown

The electoral commission had said Thursday that its computers broke down. There was no indication they were working again until the PRI produced its figures from the commission Friday afternoon.

Rivals Attack Figures

Rival parties immediately attacked the figures as an example of PRI trickery. “We are sure these polls have been especially chosen to give a slanted picture of how the results are going. These polls have been manipulated,” said Cardenas.

Cardenas charged that some of the returns released by Salinas included precincts with a 100% PRI vote, which he considered evidence of fraud.

Earlier in the day, Clouthier told reporters that no one could predict who was winning. “The result is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” he said, borrowing from a statement that Winston Churchill made about the Soviet Union in 1939.

The uncertain vote count muddied an already turbulent entrance by Mexico into a new political era: After 60 years, the PRI is no longer the dominant political force that it once was.

PRI officials are privately admitting that their candidate was the loser in populous Mexico City, the rural states of Michoacan and Morelos and perhaps a few other states. Close counts were reported in Mexico’s northern tier of states as well.

The leaders of Mexico in the 1920s created the PRI to put an end to violent political wrangling in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Today, the question becomes whether its weakening means chaos or a steady change to multiparty politics for Mexico.

Political Tumult

So far, the change has meant political squabbling, numerous charges of fraud and incipient public street protests.

Several PRI officials interviewed by The Times said that the relatively low vote for Salinas set off a conflict within the PRI between those who want to accept the returns gracefully and those who want a bigger margin to be shown, by legal means or otherwise.

Because seats in Mexico’s legislature also were at stake, a reduced margin of victory inevitably will mean fewer places in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate for PRI supporters. Such seats traditionally have been centers of influence for party labor and farm bosses.

The PRI has never surrendered a Senate seat to an opposition party. “Until July 5, we could say we were the majority party. Now, we are willing to say otherwise,” said one PRI moderate.

Some sources said Salinas is doing battle with Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz, a former rival of Salinas’ for the PRI presidential nomination, over the results. Bartlett, according to these sources, is working on behalf of PRI traditionalists who want to inflate the vote, while Salinas is willing to accept lower totals.

Demands Foreseen

In any case, the PRI may well have a hard time pulling itself together. Whatever the final outcome of the election, both Cardenas and Clouthier are bound to make demands on the government at the expense of PRI old-timers.

Both men also have kept the pressure on the PRI by claiming victory and charging that votes were stolen. On Friday, Clouthier charged that the government was hiding its computers from opposition parties and carrying out electronic fraud. Moreover, he asserted, the PRI had organized brigades to cast ballots more than once.

Clouthier added that, in violation of Mexican electoral law, the ink meant to stain thumbs of voters as they left the polling places, and therefore assure that they could not vote twice, was not indelible and could be quickly washed off. Clouthier called for a protest demonstration in downtown Mexico City today.