SOMETHING LIKE a major earthquake has shaken Mexican politics. The 71-year grip of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on the presidency has been decisively broken by the National Action Party (PAN) and its candidate Vicente Fox. Victory at the polls was a gift to Fox on his 58th birthday, the day of the polls.
The PRI, the world's longest ruling political party, has controlled every level of Mexican politics from small town Mayorships through state Governorships to the Presidency. A combination of loyalty, fraud, benefits - and violence - has been used to totally dominate Mexican political life.
In recent years, political reforms have brought in some non-PRI leadership at levels below the presidency. Ten of 31 state Governorships and the powerful Mayorship of Mexico City have been won by opposition parties which also now have a majority in the Congress. But up until a few months ago hardly anyone seriously believed that the PRI would allow itself to lose the all-important six-year presidency.
Businessman Fox steadily closed the gap in the opinion polls between himself and Francisco Labastida the career-politician who was the PRI-anointed successor to current President Ernesto Zedillo.
The reforms have cleaned up the electoral system substantially with an independent body running the elections, equal public financing for candidates, and photographic identification. The actual vote defied the opinion polls and handed Fox (43.4 per cent) a clear victory over Labastida (35.2 per cent). Both candidates ran as reformers on similar economic platforms.
The result must therefore be read as a vote against the old Mexico, moulded and ruled by the PRI and a vote for change made possible by democratic reforms. At this time, Carlos Salinas the 'winner' of the 1988 elections, who is now in self-imposed exile, must be remembered as the man, like Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, who opened the door of political reform at such great cost to himself and now to his party.
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