Latin American Paper

THE DEMOCRATIC REVELATION Andreas Schedler O n 2 July 2000, Mexican citizens threw out the world’s longest- reigning political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had held power in Mexico for most of the twentieth century. In recent years, there has been heated debate about whether Mexico qualified as an electoral democracy; now, it is clear and beyond dispute.

Mexico has reaffirmed its membership in the international democratic community. Yet the democratic fiesta of July 2 did not suddenly give birth to democracy; it merely made visible fundamental changes that had been taking place under the veil of governmental continuity.

The PRI was founded in 1929, in the aftermath of the civil wars of 1910–20, to put an end to armed strife between regional warlords and rival revolutionary factions. In its 71 years of continuous rule, the party accomplished this basic mission. It brought a degree of social peace and political stability widely admired throughout Latin America. At the same time, however, it set up an authoritarian regime whose nature seemed as exceptional as its longevity. Scholars have been creative in coining con- cepts to classify the unclassifiable, describing Mexico under PRI rule as a civilian, inclusive, corporatist, and hyperpresidential authoritarian regime held together by a hegemonic state party. As the Latin American regional pendulum swung from democracy to authoritarianism and back again, Mexico’s semiliberal “authoritarianism with adjectives” always seemed to be out of phase.

Yet the notion of Mexican exceptionalism was flawed from the Andreas Schedler, professor of political science at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Mexico City, chairs the Research Committee on Concepts and Methods (C&M) of the International Political Science Association. His latest book (coedited with Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner) is The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies (1999). His current research focuses on democratization and electoral administration in Mexico. Journal of Democracy Volume 11, Number 4 October 2000 Mexico’s Victory Journal of Democracy 6 beginning. The country’s hegemonic-party regime was not sui generis; it belonged to a species that was widespread in the past and is spreading again in the present—electoral authoritarianism. Electoral autocracies reproduce and legitimate themselves through periodic elections that show some measure of pluralism but fall short of minimum democratic standards. Their violations of liberal-democratic norms may be manifold, and Mexico had nearly all of them in place: limitations on civil liberties, restrictions upon party and candidate registration, electoral fraud, electoral corruption through vote-buying and coercion, and a dramatically uneven playing field, with the ruling party enjoying a near-monopoly of access to media and campaign resources.

At the same time, Mexico’s postrevolutionary regime showed a deep respect for the forms of electoral democracy. Since 1934, presidential elections have been held with clocklike precision every six years, punctu- ating a dense calendar of regular legislative, gubernatorial, and municipal elections. Yet these democratic forms were hollow rituals, given the systematic absence of minimal democratic guarantees. Over the decades, the combination of fine-tuned antidemocratic restrictions and genuine popular support made the PRI regime unbeatable. As the country’s protracted transition to democracy finally got under way in the early 1980s, however, opposition parties succeeded in gradually undermining both pillars of this regime: its antidemocratic structures and its popular legitimacy. An Ambiguous Transition Students of Mexican politics tend to think that the country’s democratic transition was as exceptional as the regime that it brought to an end.

Without doubt, that regime had some peculiar traits. While transitions from military rule center on the negotiation of military prerogatives, transitions from electoral authoritarianism revolve around the incumbent party’s electoral prerogatives. Moreover, Mexico went through the unusual experience of a regime change without a change of government. A “silent revolution” transformed its electoral infrastructure, its party system, its legislative politics, and its federal system under the deceptive surface of constitutional and governmental continuity. Compared to the early “third wave” transitions in Southern Europe and South America, the Mexican transition looked like a distinctly postmodern phenomenon characterized by multiple absences: no collapse, no foundational elections, no big pacts, no constitutional assembly, and no alternation in power. 1 Still, in its basic dynamics, the Mexican transition was played out along the lines of the standard four-player game between authoritarian incumbents (split into “hard-liners” and “soft-liners”) and a democratic opposition (split into “moderates” and “maximalists”). The divisions on both sides faithfully reflected the basic dilemmas of the ancien régime. Under electoral Andreas Schedler7 authoritarianism, opposition parties face the choice of participating in or boycotting the electoral farce, while incumbents have to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of keeping opposition actors under control and keeping them in the game. Accordingly, during a regime transition, incumbents split over the question of how to cope with the institutional uncertainty of democracy, and opposition actors split over the question of how to cope with the institutional ambiguity of democratization.

Right up to July 2, the two major opposition parties participated in elections and electoral-reform negotiations, while reserving the right to reject the results. The conservative National Action Party (PAN), founded in 1939, represented the regime’s only genuine, even if weak, opposition until the late 1980s. The PAN had a long history of playing the ambiguous game of authoritarian elections, using a complex combination of tactics:

electoral participation, extrainstitutional protest, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the presidential office. By contrast, the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), founded in 1989 by PRI defector Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who was convinced that he had been robbed of victory in the 1988 presidential election, consistently refused to accept reforms that brought only limited progress without establishing fully democratic institutions.

This combination of cooperative and conflictual strategies allowed the opposition to peel off successive layers of authoritarian control in a series of five electoral reforms beginning in 1987. As opposition parties gained strength in electoral competition, they were able to extract further concessions from the government. Aided by external shocks such as the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the economic crisis of 1995, this “virtuous circle” of democratization was propelled by a gradual trans- formation both of electoral institutions and of the correlation of political forces.

A few telling figures illustrate the increasing competitiveness of the party system: Until the early 1980s, opposition parties succeeded in winning only the odd municipal election, but by the end of 1999, opposition mayors governed more than half of Mexico’s total population. The opposition parties did not win any gubernatorial contests until 1989, but by mid-2000 they controlled 11 of the 31 federal states. The first opposition candidate was not elected to the Senate until 1988, but in the 1997 midterm elections the PRI lost its two-thirds Senate majority. Until 1988, the PRI had always commanded a comfortable two-thirds majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but in 1997 it lost its absolute majority in the lower chamber, inaugurating an unprecedented experiment with divided government. The Electoral Revolution Until the early 1990s, the PRI regime was renowned as one of the world’s leading practitioners of electoral fraud. In essence, the organization Journal of Democracy 8 of elections lay in the hands of the state, and the state lay in the hands of the PRI. There were no checks, no balances, no mechanisms of oversight.

The PRI was free to distort the process at will—to shave the voter list, to stuff ballot boxes, to expel party representatives from polling stations, or to allow the dead to express their rational preference for the ruling party.

It is no exaggeration to say that everything is different today. The negotiated electoral reforms enacted in 1987, 1990, 1993, 1994, and 1996 have added up to a veritable electoral revolution.

The list of institutional innovations is impressive. The new electoral code spreads a dense network of regulation over the electoral process.

The new voter registry ranks among the world’s best in terms of coverage and reliability. Voter lists contain individual photographs of all eligible voters (well over 58 million in 2000). The new high-tech voter registration card has become the major means of personal identification in the country.

Polling-station officials are ordinary citizens selected in a two-stage random procedure. Ballot boxes are transparent. The ballots themselves— with various watermarks, visible and invisible fibers, microprinting, and inverted printing—are harder to forge than U.S. dollars. A special attorney prosecutes electoral offenses defined as violations of the penal code.

The three load-bearing columns of the new electoral system are a new independent election commission, the judicialization of conflict resolution, and comprehensive oversight by political parties. In accor- dance with international trends, the Mexican parties decided to entrust the organization of elections to a permanent and independent agency, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), founded in 1990. Since 1996, the IFE’s top oversight and management body, the General Council, has been controlled by nine nonpartisan officials appointed by consensus by the three major parties in Congress. After the 1997 midterm elections, these officials came into some sharp conflicts with the PRI, but they maintained the full confidence of the major opposition parties.

Mexico had a long tradition of congressional “self-certification,” with members of Congress validating their own victories without any means of legal recourse, but the electoral reforms that began in 1987 have gradually built up an increasingly autonomous and impartial judicial system to resolve electoral disputes. Today, the federal electoral tribunal, which has the final say over all electoral conflicts (including local disputes), proudly publicizes the apparently unbiased statistical record of its findings. Still, opposition parties are reluctant to forget (or forgive) the tribunal’s restrictive reading of the law, which has consistently favored the PRI. 2 Finally, the parties have institutionalized a “panoptic regime” of sur- veillance that allows them to monitor closely the entire electoral process, step by step. Their vigilant presence goes far beyond the deployment of representatives on election day. Parties act as vigorous agents of account- ability in the General Council (to which they belong as consultative Andreas Schedler9 members) and other organs of the IFE, and they are legally entitled (and actively committed) to oversee the organization of each phase of the elections, from voter registration to vote counting. Given the maximum- security system in place, IFE president José Woldenberg could confidently affirm in October 1999 that the structural “conditions of electoral fraud” had been effectively “eliminated.” Selecting Candidates The July 2000 presidential campaign took off immediately after the 1997 midterm elections. As Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the PRD’s “moral leader,” had just been elected mayor of Mexico City, it was quite clear that he would seek the presidency (as he had in 1988 and 1994). Vicente Fox, then PAN governor of the small state of Guanajuato, declared his intention to run for president as early as July 1997. Both candidates knew, however, that the historical division between the opposition parties would give the PRI a good chance to hang onto the presidency.

Accordingly, in mid-1999 the two parties started to negotiate an elec- toral alliance. In 1990, the PRI sought to prevent an eventual reconstitu- tion of Cárdenas’s loose multiparty coalition of 1988 by pushing through legal changes requiring parties that wanted to nominate a common presi- dential candidate to present common legislative slates on the basis of a common policy platform. After several months of intense negotiations, the PAN and the PRD agreed on a common policy platform and a formula for assigning legislative candidates. In the end, however, the opposition convergence broke down because the two parties were unable to agree on how to select a common presidential candidate. The PAN wanted to let the public-opinion polls decide (which was unacceptable to Cárdenas, who was well behind Fox in the polls), while the PRD proposed to hold a primary election (which was unacceptable to Fox, given the recent history of disorganized, fraudulent, and disputed elections within the PRD).

Subsequently, both candidates had no problem in getting their own parties to nominate them. Cárdenas was the PRD’s “natural candidate,” while Fox conquered the PAN with an early media campaign that put him well ahead of any other potential candidate. Still, both parties tried to fabricate something resembling an antigovernment coalition. The PRD formed the “Alliance for Mexico” with four proto-parties whose ideo- logical profiles ranged from left-wing opportunism to right-wing obscurantism. The PAN formed the “Alliance for Change” with the “green” party PVEM, a patrimonial family enterprise. In addition, two experienced politicians with well-earned reputations for political narcissism decided to run alone. Former Carlos Salinas protégé Manuel Camacho nominated himself as the candidate of his personal party vehicle, the Party of the Democratic Center, and former PRI and PRD Journal of Democracy 10 president Porfirio Mun‹oz Ledo temporarily jumped on the bandwagon of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution, the reincarnation of an old PRI satellite party. The only programmatically serious new party, the Social Democratic Party (PDS), ran its own candidate, Gilberto Rincón Gallardo, a former communist activist who had credibly converted to the new left.

In the governing camp, President Ernesto Zedillo kept his promise that he would be the first postrevolutionary president to renounce the privilege of designating his own successor. In fact, through 1994—when President Carlos Salinas (1988–94) got Zedillo nominated to replace PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who had been assassinated in the midst of his presidential campaign—the famous dedazo, the metaphorical presidential finger pointing out his chosen successor, had been symbolic of the Mexican president’s vast extraconstitutional powers. Yet Zedillo, in line with his professed democratic convictions, renounced the privilege. After some months of hesitation, the PRI finally decided to risk an open primary.

In a fierce campaign punctuated by two public debates and countless personal attacks, Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo emerged as the main challenger to “official” candidate Francisco Labastida, a former Minister of the Interior under Zedillo. A youthful old-style politician who was highly popular in his state, Madrazo had become notorious for lavish campaign spending and had built a mixed record of repression and efficiency in office. He ran a professional media campaign, projecting himself as an energetic anti-establishment candidate, but he seemingly addressed the wrong audience and ended up being more popular outside the PRI than within it.

In the primary, the PRI gave an impressive demonstration of its enormous organizational and mobilizational capacity. More than eight million voters turned out to vote at more than 64,000 polling stations.

Labastida, winning 55 percent of the vote and 91 percent of the 300 electoral districts, gained an easy victory. Madrazo came in second, winning 28 percent of the vote and 21 districts. After some minor protests from his followers, he accepted the result and went back home to Tabasco. The party’s risky democratic experiment seemed to have paid off. In the weeks following the primary election, Labastida took the lead in the opinion polls. Polls and Platforms When first-past-the-post electoral systems fail to produce a bipolar competition between two candidates, voters face an acute problem of strategic coordination. With the PAN and PRD having failed to join forces in an electoral alliance, opposition voters had to decide which candidate would be most likely to dethrone the PRI. Vicente Fox skillfully solved this problem of coordinating voter expectations by Andreas Schedler11 starting his campaign well before anybody else (which gave him a wide lead in the opinion polls before his competitors entered the race), by demonstrating a resolute will to win and an unshakable faith in his own victory, and by making continual use of the polls to confirm both Cárdenas’s lack of competitiveness and his own strong competitive position vis-a÷-vis Labastida. Fox’s consistent lead over Cárdenas deterred opposition voters from “wasting” their votes on the PRD candidate, while his “virtual tie” with Labastida in the polls helped to convince them that this time their vote would make a difference.

The three major candidates ran intensive media campaigns, held large rallies all over the country, and confronted one another in two televised debates. The tone was sharp, and personal attacks sometimes went beyond the bounds of public decency. Yet, remarkably, the candidates all agreed on such basic goals as the necessity of investing in education, combating crime and corruption, maintaining macroeconomic stability, and achieving high rates of economic growth and job creation.

Labastida tried to reconcile the tensions that pervaded the PRI by hiding them beneath a rhetorical veil that promised everything to everybody. During most of his campaign, he looked like an actor playing the role of a self-confident winner, while trying to find the proper balance between populism and conservatism, between promises of change and of continuity, between left-wing invocations of popular government and right-wing affirmations of law and order, and between humility and arrogance. While passionately advertising the democratic transmutation of the “new PRI,” he increasingly began to rely on the party’s old guard as his campaign began to falter.

Cárdenas ran a campaign for the convinced, performing the role of the good guy, destined to lose, but still waging a lonely fight for the poor and vulnerable. With great dignity and personal integrity, he defended all the good causes he was supposed to defend and attacked all the bad guys he was supposed to attack. His was very much a presidential campaign in the old Mexican style. Cárdenas campaigned close to the people, visiting the most remote places in long and exhausting trips. By reaffirming a combative but largely abstract left-wing identity, denoun- cing poverty and corruption, bashing neoliberalism, and defending the national petroleum industry, he may have pleased that portion of the electorate who would not have voted for any other opposition candidate, but his rusty tunes of revolutionary nationalism had little appeal beyond the PRD’s core voters.

Fox ran a creative and visually attractive media campaign that radiated high spirits and self-confidence. Knowing that he could count on traditional conservative voters, he put great efforts into broadening his electoral base by combining a commitment to political, economic, and cultural liberalism with a strong emphasis on poverty reduction through economic growth, targeted social programs, and an “educational Journal of Democracy 12 revolution.” As election day approached, Fox made overtures to the left to reassure defecting PRD voters. He voluntarily bound himself to the coalition program that the PAN and PRD had negotiated months before, and promised to invite PRD members into his “pluralist and inclusionary” cabinet. Overall, he demonstrated a capacity to learn. He started out as an uncouth populist, oblivious of the rules of courtesy and diplomacy, but by the first presidential debate in late April he began to present himself more formally, adopting more measured language and more “presidential” manners. Money and Media When a ruling party attempts to manage a process of democratization through elections, it does not just hand over power to the opposition and retire from the political arena. It enters the electoral game intending to steamroller the nascent opposition at the polls. Such democratizing elections may look reasonably clean, but they seldom look fair. The ruling party usually tries to mobilize the entire state apparatus on its behalf and enjoys privileged access to the mass media. Opposition parties often can do little more than complain and continue the uneven game under protest.

Mexico’s electoral reforms, especially Zedillo’s 1996 reforms, did much to level the electoral playing field, equalizing parties’ access to financial resources by combining generous public funding with strict limits on private financing, realistic campaign-spending ceilings, rigorous accounting requirements, and close IFE oversight of party finance. The three major contending parties thus entered the race under extraordinarily even financial conditions.

In the sphere of mass communication, all of the parties shared free access to a total of 200 television hours and 250 radio hours. This free air time was less significant, though, than the fact that the (largely private) media were far less politically subservient than they had been in the past. Objective reporting and critical journalism are no longer restricted to small islands of professional integrity. Still, the media, especially the local media, tended to retain a certain bias in favor of the PRI, whose relative coverage increased as election day approached. The IFE continually monitored news reporting on national and regional radio and television (where most Mexicans receive their political information).

According to its studies, between mid-January and early June the PRI received 39.1 percent, the Alliance for Change 27.4 percent, and the Alliance for Mexico 19.9 percent of the (largely neutral) coverage on nationwide radio and television news. 3 This skewed pattern of media reporting might be justified on the grounds that the PRI was still by far the largest party, but it clearly fell short of the balanced treatment that the parties had received in 1997. In fact, it was closer to the favorable treatment the PRI received from the media in 1994. 4 Still, at the end of Andreas Schedler13 the (voting) day, both opposition candidates warmly congratulated the media for their positive contribution to the electoral process. Vote-Buying and Coercion As countries engage in democratizing reforms, efforts to control electoral fraud may generate unintentional “hidden costs.” In the course of its transition, Mexico had made striking progress in the realms of political liberties, electoral integrity, and competitive fairness. Now, opposition parties were ready to assault the last bastion of authoritarian control over elections—vote-buying and coercion, which, paradoxically, may actually have increased as a by-product of democratization. As local PRI bosses were deprived of all other means of controlling electoral outcomes, some apparently took refuge in electoral corruption—the invasion of the electoral sphere by money (vote-buying) and power (voter coercion). In the months leading up to the July 2 elections, widespread episodic evidence seemed to indicate that the PRI was intensifying its efforts to win votes illegitimately. Complaints focused on four strategies for exploiting material resources for electoral purposes: 1) courting voters; 2) bribing voters; 3) coercing voters; and 4) threatening voters.

1) Courting voters. Led by President Zedillo, the PRI asked citizens to reward the current government for its positive social and economic performance. The president accelerated his daily routine of ribbon- cutting ceremonies, the government kept advertising its achievements on national television until election day, and the PRI flooded the beneficiaries of federal social programs with party propaganda.

2) Bribing voters. The PRI offered voters all sorts of goods and services, including pencils, sun caps, beans, tortillas, plastic buckets, toiletries, construction material, gasoline, taxi licenses, property titles, and microcredits, as well as monetary payments ranging from about $6 to $500. Often, the intention of exchanging material goods for votes was made explicit.

3) Coercing voters. PRI representatives used veiled or open threats of reprisal to force people to take an active part in the campaign, making public servants deliver lists of presumptive PRI voters and requiring clients of social programs to attend campaign rallies.

4) Threatening voters. PRI candidates told voters that they would stop receiving certain public services and subsidies if they failed to vote for the ruling party. It is a thin line that separates electoral promises from electoral extortion, and PRI representatives seemed to cross it with relative ease.

Some of the practices denounced under the rubric of “vote-buying and coercion” are legal; others constitute penal offenses. (Such violations, however, are hard to prove in court, and even a guilty verdict will not invalidate the election results.) All in all, the PRI demonstrated its Journal of Democracy 14 willingness and ability to resort to old-style machine politics. 5 Still, it is difficult to assess the net effect of such practices upon voting behavior.

Their effectiveness hinges on the secrecy of the vote. Although the vote is in fact overwhelmingly secret in contemporary Mexico, 16 percent of poor voters are nonetheless convinced that unnamed others “know for whom I vote and may take reprisals.” 6 Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate voters’ capacity for autonomous judgment or their deep sense of personal dignity. Voters may accept gifts but still vote their conscience. They may listen to threats and still dismiss them. They may attend campaign rallies but still resent having to be there against their will. Moreover, politics is an interactive game. As local PRI bosses went shopping for voters, the IFE, opposition parties, the Chamber of Deputies, the federal government, civic associations, and the media reinforced their campaigns in defense of the free and secret vote. On balance, the PRI’s vote-buying efforts may have had the paradoxical effect of cementing the liberal-democratic pillars of Mexico’s political culture.

In any case, a few weeks before the elections, the debates over vote- buying and coercion suddenly became quite heated. Cárdenas announced that if a majority of citizens felt that the elections were not legitimate, he was prepared to place himself at the head of a civic insurrection to have them annulled. Fox declared that Labastida would have to win by a margin of at least 10 percent for his victory to be accepted as legitimate.

Accordingly, PRI leaders, who never seriously considered the possibility of losing, began to worry that the opposition might not accept the verdict of the polls. Once again, the ambiguities of Mexico’s transition seemed to generate dangerous turbulence. Surprising Normality The days preceding the elections passed quietly, as did election day itself. From private homes to the PRI headquarters, everybody was watch- ing the finals of the European soccer championships on television. The election itself was a masterpiece of logistical and administrative efficiency.

Over 58 million citizens were eligible to vote, and more than 790,000 of them were selected by lot to administer the voting process as polling- station officials. The IFE distributed about 345,000 ballot boxes, 184.9 million ballot papers, 7.9 million auxiliary documents, 2.3 million pens, and 231,000 bottles of indelible ink. Representatives of more than one political party or coalition had been accredited to 93.8 percent of the polling sites, and well over 36,000 national and 800 international observers monitored the elections. In addition, the IFE deployed more than 16,000 well-trained asistentes, who shuttled between polling stations to detect and resolve problems as they were arising. This allowed the IFE to resolve on the spot 97.4 percent of the 3,043 complaints registered during election day. In fact, the whole electoral machinery ran so well that everyone was Andreas Schedler15 full of praise. As former president Jimmy Carter observed with admiration:

“IFE left nothing uncovered, no stone unturned.” Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, former president of Bolivia (who led a small delegation of election observers together with Carter), agreed: “This was the best electoral process I have ever seen.” 7 For at least the past three years, Mexican politics had been a long marathon toward this one big redeeming day. As opinion polls had predicted a very close race, many feared the contest would be decided by a margin of one or two percentage points. A close result was sure to be a controversial result. Whoever came in second would try to reverse his defeat through street protests and litigation.

In accordance with the electoral code, the official results would not be ready until the week after the election. In an extraordinary effort to assure the transparency and credibility of the vote count, IFE set up an expensive and sophisticated program of preliminary electoral results (PREP). As polling stations finished the tally, they sent a copy of their official results to the PREP center, where they were computed in public, on big screens as well as on the Internet. This procedure removed the asymmetry of information that had been so devastating to the credibility of the electoral process in 1988, when the computer system broke down and nobody ever learned what had happened. Through PREP, the rest of the world received exactly the same information as the election authorities, at exactly the same time. To complete its picture with statistically representative data, the IFE commissioned three official “quick counts.” In addition, several civic associations and business firms did their own quick counts, while others conducted exit polls.

By law, exit polls could not be made public before the polls officially closed at 8 p.m. At eight o’clock sharp, the private television giant Televisa’s exit poll showed Fox leading with 44 percent of the vote, ahead of Labastida and Cárdenas, with 38 and 16 percent, respectively.

These data met with incredulity from some quarters. Over the next three hours, however, the reigning disbelief dissipated as the results of other exit polls and the preliminary results of quick counts came in. The exact percentages varied but all of them coincided in giving Fox a clear lead over Labastida. It was the best of all worlds—convergent tendencies and a clear result. At about 10:30, Cárdenas conceded. At 11:00, IFE president José Woldenberg presented the official quick counts that con- firmed Fox’s victory beyond the margin of statistical error. Immediately afterwards, President Zedillo stepped before the national television cameras and graciously acknowledged the opposition victory. Minutes later, Labastida, visibly shaken, did the same.

Thus the end of seven decades of one-party rule was sealed in three short hours; Mexico put a clear end to its prolonged transition and, at the same time, made clear that democracy had become “the only game in town.” This was the real democratic revelation of election night: Journal of Democracy 16 CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES , P ERCENTAGE OF SEATS , 1982–2000 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 PRI 74.5 72.2 52.0 64.0 60.2 47.8 41.8 PAN 1 12.7 10.2 20.2 17.8 23.8 24.2 44.6 PRD 2 4.2 3.0 27.8 8.2 14.0 25.0 13.6 Mexican democracy is already fully consolidated. It came to stay, and did so with a surprising air of normality. A Mandate for Change and Consensus According to the final results of the presidential election, Vicente Fox obtained 43.5 percent, Francisco Labastida, 36.9 percent, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, 17.0 percent of the vote (see Table 1 above). In retrospect, this result is easy to explain. Fox succeeded in attracting the anti-PRI, antiregime, anti–status quo, and antigovernment vote. Cárdenas received substantially fewer presidential votes than members of his coalition received for the Chamber of Deputies. According to one exit poll, only three-quarters of those who supported the Alliance for Mexico in the legislative elections voted for Cárdenas for president. More than 70 percent of those who did not voted for Fox. 8 After 71 years of PRI rule, it was easy to argue that it was time for a change. Yet unlike the preceding presidential elections of 1988 and 1994, the situation was highly favorable to Fox’s promise of change without rupture. The elections were clean and credible; the political scene was calm; there were no top-level assassinations and no telegenic guerrilla groups; some disturbances took place but there were no massive social protests; and the economy looked solid and thriving. In fact, Zedillo did all he could to break the recurrent cycles of crises that had shaken the Mexican economy during every presidential election since 1976. TABLE 1—P RESIDENTIAL E LECTIONS PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL VOTE , 1982–2000 1982 1988 1994 2000 PRI 68.4 50.7 48.8 36.1 PAN 1 15.7 16.8 25.9 42.5 PRD 2 3.5 30.6 16.6 16.6 TABLE 2—M EXICO ’S L EGISLATURE SENATE , P ERCENTAGE OF SEATS , 1988–2000 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 PRI 93.7 95.3 74.2 60.9 46.9 PAN 1 1.6 19.5 25.8 39.8 PRD 2 6.2 3.1 6.2 11.1 13.3 1 2000: Alliance for Change.2 1982–85: Mexican Unified Socialist Party (PSUM); 1988: National Democratic Front (FDN); 2000: Alliance for Mexico.

Sources: 1982-94: Silvia Gómez Tagle, La transición inconclusa: Treinta an‹ os de elecciones en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1997); 1997–2000: Federal Electoral Institute. Andreas Schedler17 Accordingly, although the traditional PRI appeal to fear was not entirely absent in 2000 campaign, it fell on deaf ears.

In general, the 2000 elections suggest that Mexican voters are far less volatile and unpredictable than some seem to think, confirming some broad tendencies that have characterized federal elections during the previous decade. The “secular decline” of the PRI continued. The PRI did not benefit from abstention. In a kind of “asymmetric pocketbook- voting,” voters tended to penalize the PRI for bad economic news but did not reward it for good economic news. The young, urban, and educated voted for the PAN. Although the PRI still received a dispropor- tionate share of the rural vote, this time its reserves in the countryside were not enough. Mexican citizens have come a long way in their transi- tion from clientelism to citizenship.

The July 2 elections also revealed a sophisticated electorate that confers and divides power in a highly differentiated way. As Table 2 shows, Fox proved to have long coattails: The Alliance for Change captured 223 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, 208 for the PAN and 15 for the PVEM. The PRI, however, will remain the largest party in the chamber, with 209 out of 500 seats. The Alliance for Mexico will have 68 deputies, 53 belonging to the PRD and the rest to its junior partners.

The big winner is the PAN, whose share of the seats will increase from 24.2 to 41.6 percent. The big loser is the PRD, whose share of the seats will fall from 25.0 to 10.6 percent. The PRI lost its majority in the 128- member Senate, dropping from 78 to 60 seats. The PRD kept its 15 seats, and the PAN went up from 33 to 46 seats. As before, the remaining seats are distributed among smaller parties. Turnout was relatively low, at 64 percent.

In Mexico City, Manuel López Obrador, with 39.5 percent of the vote, was elected mayor, keeping the office in the PRD column. PAN candidate Santiago Creel came in second, with a highly respectable 34.0 percent.

PRI candidate and former finance minister Jesús Silva Herzog finished third, with only 22.3 percent of the vote. The PRD also won 11 out of Mexico City’s 16 district mayors, with the rest going to the PAN. The Future of Party Politics Ernesto Zedillo will go down in history as the man who succeeded in combining democratizing reform with a determination to make democratic rules stick at a crucial moment. Furthermore, he has been extraordinarily cooperative in orchestrating for Fox what Zedillo himself did not have in 1994—a transparent and professional transfer of power. He has taken early and constructive steps to transform the long five-month period of governmental transition (Fox will be sworn in on December 1) into an exercise of republican maturity. Fox has reciprocated the spirit of cooperation. In his televised victory speech, he completed the conversion Journal of Democracy 18 from a polemical candidate to a conciliatory and generous statesman. Since then, he has been projecting himself as an open-minded consensus-builder who is not haunted by the past and is eager to tackle present challenges.

He has continually reaffirmed his commitment to maximize consensus, to form a plural and inclusive cabinet, and to establish fair and constructive relations with both Congress and the state governors. In his first weeks as president-elect, Fox has done everything possible to dissipate the concerns of those critics who feared that he might turn into a plebiscitarian, anti- institutional populist.

Fox may be open to dialogue, but he still needs someone to talk to.

His relations with his own party, the PAN, will not be without friction, but in the end the dependence of each on the other is likely to push them toward a mutually supportive relationship. Yet considerable uncertainty surrounds the other key interlocutors in the party system, the PRI and the PRD. Both parties have suffered true “electoral shocks” and will struggle for some time to adapt to the new realities of power. Both parties have lost the systemic context that gave them purpose and unity. The PRI, born as a party in power, has lost its spinal column, the presidency.

The PRD has lost its cause, democratization. Both parties will have to resolve the vital problems of leadership and internal structure, to define their role as opposition parties, and to redefine their programmatic identity. Both parties are likely to dispute the same ideological terrain, seeking to position themselves somewhere between national revolu- tionary populism and a modern social-democratic left. Finally, both parties are struggling for their survival. It is possible that the PRI will fall apart. To date, though, the party has survived the many requiems written for it, and it may well be the PRD that will lose the competition for the center-left side of the party spectrum. Perhaps, we will witness the emergence of a two-and-a-half-party system, with the PRD reduced to the traditionally minuscule voice of the left.

Whatever the shape of the party system in the long run, the decisive actors in the short term will be the parties in Congress. Fox will enjoy a strong base of support in both chambers, but he will not have a majority.

His success will depend on his ability to develop cooperative and productive relations with the legislature. The prospects for this are favorable. In the preceding legislative term, divided government did not lead to deadlock, as the parties proved to be surprisingly productive, consensus-oriented, and open to presidential initiatives. 9 There are good reasons to expect that the politics of shifting alliances will continue in the future. The PRI has already chosen its congressional leaders, who promise to lead a responsible opposition, willing to search for common ground. The PRD has also shown a willingness to cooperate with Fox.

Overall, the credible commitment of key actors to the virtues of modera- tion, dialogue, and compromise bodes well for Mexico’s democratic future. Although it faces a long list of pending problems and potential Andreas Schedler19 conflicts, Mexico, for the first time in its modern history, now has the opportunity to become serious about resolving them.

NOTES The author wishes to thank the Austrian Academy of Sciences for supporting work on this article through the Austrian Program for Advanced Research and Technology (APART).

1. For a systematic analysis of the “missing links” of the Mexican transition, see José Antonio Crespo, Fronteras democráticas en México: Retos, peculiaridades y comparaciones (Mexico City: Océano, 1999), 191–222. On postmodernity as a “collection of absences,” see Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), 218.

2. The authoritative source on the judicialization of electoral conflict resolution in Mexico is Todd Eisenstadt, “Courting Democracy: Party Strategies, Electoral Institution Building, and Political Opening—Mexico in Comparative Perspective” (Ph.D. diss., University of California–San Diego, 1998).

3. Instituto Federal Electoral, “Información básica sobre el proceso electoral federal de 1999–2000” (Mexico City: IFE, 2000), 12.

4. Raúl Trejo Delarbre, “Los medios también votan: Las campan‹as de 1997 en televisión y prensa—Un informe preliminar,” in Louis Salazar, ed., 1997: Elecciones y transición a la democracia en México (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1999), 281.

5. The worst incident was reported from Mixistlán, a small village in the poor southern state of Oaxaca. On 14 June 2000, municipal authorities convened a PRI rally, warning that anyone who failed to attend would be ineligible for federal social-assistance programs.

At the end of the meeting, 24-year-old Artemio Antonio Pérez stood up, calling on PRI candidate Cándido Coheto Martínez to stop “deceiving” and “abusing the poverty” of his fellowmen by making “false promises.” The candidate, upset over the young man’s insubordination, angrily ordered that the man be put in jail. The words he used are as revealing as they are untranslatable: “Oye quien es este hijo de su chingada madre que se esta creyendo . . . mete a la cárcel a este cabrón y pártele su madre para que escarmiente este pinche alborotador y se eduque.” The next day, municipal authorities delivered the young man’s body, beaten to death, to his mother. For the whole story, as reported by the victim’s brother, see the appendix to Movimiento Ciudadano por la Democracia, La pobreza y marginación, instrumento electoral de los partidos políticos: Casos de compra y coacción del voto e irregularidades en el proceso electoral del 2000 (Mexico City: MCD, 2000).

Two months later, Cándido Coheto was a happy deputy-elect, while the criminal trial of the municipal authorities was at a standstill and likely to lead nowhere.

6. MUND Opinion Services, “Mundo 2000,” nationwide survey (May 2000), n=4.634.

7. Common press conference, Mexico City, Sheraton Hotel, 3 July 2000.

8. “El manifiesto del poder dividido,” La Reforma (Mexico City), 3 July 2000, 2A.

9. See María Amparo Casar, “Coaliciones y cohesión partidista en un congreso sin mayoría: la Cámara de Diputados de México, 1997–1999,” Política y Gobierno 7 (January– June 2000): 183–202.