Enrique
Krauze

Don't believe the opinion polls regarding Sunday's Mexican presidential vote. Although the most recent ones point to a clear-cut advantage for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, there may be a surprise in store. Polling is a fairly new and notoriously unreliable phenomenon here, and the latest surveys indicate a large number of "undecideds," around 25 percent. And even if the PRI wins, it will not be able to govern in the imperious manner it has for the last 65 years.

The best hope for real democracy is a change in governing parties. The candidate of the right-of-center National Action Party, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, is the man most likely to achieve this. His party, which is affiliated with no corporate or labor groups, has endured 50 years of repression at the hands of the PRI. If he wins, Mexico will have a soft landing in democracy -- economic continuity, social order and political stability -- similar to what happened in the state of Chihuahua in 1992 when the party's candidate was elected Governor.

Mr. Fernandez's strong showing in Mexico's first-ever presidential debate in May established him as the primary challenger to the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, fell into third place.

Mr. Cardenas has revived his campaign through energetic rallies, and he projects an image of honesty and decency that will win him some of the undecided vote. Should he somehow manage to win, he will no doubt continue the economic program of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, with a greater emphasis on social equity and a substantive political reform.

The most likely scenario remains, however, a PRI victory. This poses a great threat to the country.

The PRI acts as the Government's employment agency and helps itself freely to the public treasury (particularly at the local level). It divides up legislative seats among its affiliated trade unions, peasant federations and business organizations. It has perfected an electoral alchemy that assures victory at the ballot box time after time. It controls the media, and has the support of the large business groups. It even monopolizes the colors of the Mexican flag, which carries tremendous symbolic weight among Mexicans.

There are, to be sure, many closed political systems that have transformed themselves from within: those in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, South Africa. Even a few with political traditions similar to Mexico's have done so: those in Portugal, Spain, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay.

But this requires a realization on the part of the ruling party that change is necessary. Unfortunately, the bosses of the PRI do not recognize themselves for what they are -- political relics of a distant past. They persist in regarding themselves as representatives of some sort of popular will.

Much of the electorate -- perhaps a majority -- wants a divorce between the PRI and the Government. A group of leading intellectuals has drafted a framework for this called the "20 Commitments to Achieve Democracy." Apart from demanding the complete dismantling of the PRI's electoral fraud machine, the document calls for three important reforms: granting the legislative branch real control over budget appropriations, freeing the judicial branch by depriving the President of the power to name judges, and freeing the states and municipalities from the monarchical tradition of having to wait for all important decisions to be made at the National Palace.

Any modern democrat would readily assent to these proposals, but the PRI is neither modern nor democratic. Mr. Zedillo was the only one of the three presidential candidates who refused to sign the document. He relented only this week under extreme public pressure, saying he agreed "in general" with the proposals.

Compounding the troubling rigidity of the PRI is the equally troubling rigidity of its standard-bearer. Mr. Zedillo is an honorable man, an intelligent economist and an incorrigible workaholic. Unfortunately, he is also a man of very narrow cultural horizons and vision.

One of his first projects after being appointed Minister of Education in 1992 was to change the history texts that are used in all schools. This was necessary -- the texts were products of the country's bygone leftist-populist period; they could have circulated in Cuba or North Korea with little alteration.

Never bothering to consult with teachers, parents or historians (and bypassing the law), Mr. Zedillo assigned the rewrite to a small panel of experts. Though the new texts were free of ideological distortions, they were rife with factual errors. Moreover, they were impersonal, dry and abstract, at times no doubt wholly incomprehensible to school-age children. Eventually they were quietly withdrawn from circulation.

Mr. Zedillo endured the subsequent torrent of abuse stoically, but he convinced himself that the criticisms were personal attacks or efforts at settling old political scores. He asked himself no questions before the books were prepared; he asked himself no questions when they were universally rejected. In fact, he asked no questions at all.

"Who is the political adviser behind Ernesto Zedillo?" I asked one of President Salinas's closest advisers. "Ernesto Zedillo," he responded, with a note of concern in his voice. He was right to be worried: a man who asks no questions cannot be a good politician. And today Mexico not only needs a good politician but a consummate politician.

If the PRI wins this election with more than 50 percent of the vote, we Mexicans will have aborted our landing in democracy. Many voters will be unable to believe such a result; there will be widespread accusations of fraud. In an atmosphere of civic indignation and occasional violence, the rank-and-file of the National Action Party will force its leadership to challenge the result and to support protests and strikes. The PRI could find itself in a similar situation to that of the Communists in Poland in the 80's: forced to govern a country shot through with discord and the spirit of resistance.

If the PRI wins with less than 50 percent, we are set for what might be called a forced landing in democracy. The National Action Party will recognize the result only if the PRI creates a multiparty transition government. Then an independent body, like the one created in South Africa, could undertake complete electoral reform.

In this scenario, the National Action Party might well gain several governorships before the next presidential vote. And if the the leftists of the Democratic Revolutionary Party tempered their ideology with a dose of pragmatism, they might do the same. In the year 2000 the President of Mexico may well be elected from outside the PRI.

The attitude of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari is very important. Throughout his term, he has unfailingly displayed the arrogant technocratic presumption that social changes can be adjusted as easily as the stations on a transistor radio. "I cannot allow what happened in the U.S.S.R. to happen to us," I heard him say last year -- as if he could administer democratic change with an eye-dropper. He was wrong, and now he knows it. Fifteen minutes before his midnight, he seems to have grasped the need for a thorough political reform. If the PRI wins, it will be his task to persuade Mr. Zedillo to put together a coalition government of democratic transition.

Another key factor is Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Chiapas rebels. The rapid transformation of his guerrilla uprising into a political movement suggests that we are faced with a kind of Mexican Yasir Arafat, whose demands for liberty, justice and democracy will not be satisfied by public works or schools for Indians -- he will continue to demand broad political reforms and will not lay down his arms.

And Uncle Sam? So far the American media has put pressure on the PRI to keep the elections fair through its observation and criticism. It should continue to do so. The U.S. Government is a different matter. In 1913, the American Ambassador to Mexico participated in the coup d'etat that led to the assassination of the purest democrat Mexico has ever known: President Francisco I. Madero. Now the U.S. has an opportunity to rectify this sorry historical record. It can best defend Mexican democracy through the best mechanism available: nonintervention.

Publicado en The New York Times el 18 de agosto de 1994.