A Day to Celebrate in Mexico

With today’s elections, Mexico has much to celebrate, primarily the continuing consolidation of democracy. But the hurrahs should come with a word of caution. Nations do not change overnight, and Mexicans should expect no miracles beyond what may be the fairest and most competitive election in the country’s history.

At stake are six state governorships, 32 seats in the Senate, 500 in the Chamber of Deputies and several hundred mayoralties and other local offices--but the focus of political attention is the race for the new office of governor of Mexico City, a post formerly designated mayor. Favored to win by a wide margin is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of the late President Lazaro Cardenas and himself twice a presidential candidate under the left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party, the PRD. This race is remarkable in that until recently electoral fraud was the norm and everyone knew that the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) would win.

The right-wing National Action Party (PAN) is seen as having a fair chance of capturing two of the six state governorships, with Cardenas’ PRD winning one, leaving only three for the PRI. In Congress too the picture is not good for the PRI, the party of President Ernesto Zedillo. The Chamber of Deputies may split almost equally among the three major parties, with the same result occurring among the contested regional mayoralties and local congresses outside Mexico City. Zedillo may have to learn to govern by consensus, something no previous president has needed to do.

Beyond the unusual competitive atmosphere, many factors make this a watershed election; the most important is the role of the new Federal Electoral Institute, a nonpartisan, independent body that will organize, conduct and supervise the elections. To ensure a clean vote, the institute has put in place an identification system that provides each voter with an ID bearing a personal registration number, signature, holographic photograph and thumbprint.

In the past, Washington always knew it would be dealing with a government led by the PRI. That certainty is gone. As Americans know, democracies are unpredictable, their own and now, possibly, their neighbors’.