The People's Choice, Really

By Bruce W. Nelan

It was already 8:30 a.m. on election day, and the one-room, dirt-floor polling station in San Miguel de Ocosingo, deep in the rebel territory of Chiapas state, should have opened half an hour ago. But ballot boxes had not arrived. The door stayed closed, and the line of expectant voters outside grew longer. Was this another case of ballot hijacking by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the P.R.I.? Finally, Caralampio Amparo Perez, an election official, emerged waving one of his replacement boxes over his head. He had improvised with cookie cartons; each had a hole cut into the side and covered with a plastic bag to create a makeshift window. The voters nodded, and by day's end they and the country had elected Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon Mexico's next President.

The true test of the elections was not who the winner would be -- Zedillo had been leading in most opinion polls since July -- but whether voters would believe that he had won fairly. During the P.R.I.'s lengthy reign, one of its ! most notorious achievements was its skill at arranging not to lose. But this time the electoral process had been significantly reformed, and more than 80,000 observers were stationed around the country to fend off the fraud that has been the rule so often before. The watchers, both Mexican and foreign, spotted many violations but agreed that they had seen the most open and honest election in Mexico this century.

Because of, or in spite of that, the voters stuck with the P.R.I. "He looked like somebody clean," said Isidoro Pete Gonzalez, a former opposition voter in Tijuana. "He's not contaminated yet." Said Zedillo the next day: "We are a party plainly capable of being competitive." In an interview with TIME, he noted, "The party has to be explicit about its rules of internal democracy," which might include primaries or conventions to select candidates rather than having the bosses do the picking.

The election was in large measure a referendum on the P.R.I.'s new claims to political trustworthiness and the economic policies put in place by outgoing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari -- most notably the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect Jan. 1. Many experts had been predicting that Zedillo, the unassuming technocrat plucked from obscurity after the party's first choice was assassinated in March, would win with less than half the votes and that the restive electorate would send large numbers of opposition members to Congress. The voters disproved those forecasts and gave the P.R.I. sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

The most impressive number of all was that 77% of registered voters turned out. When the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (P.R.D.) put up a strong challenge for the presidency in 1988, only 48% of the electorate went to the polls. This time, say analysts, voters truly believed that their choice would count. High-profile campaign coverage convinced many that a real race was on, and a massive registration program provided new photo identification cards to more than 45 million of the 50 million eligible voters.

There were encouraging signs that a genuine two-party system is beginning to emerge. Six splinter parties did very poorly; so did the leftist P.R.D., led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, which won only 17%. His party seems likely to fracture and fade further. Meanwhile, the center-right, business-oriented National Action Party (P.A.N.) surged from 16% of the electorate in 1988 to almost 27%. % The party looks like a challenger in the making. "For the P.A.N.," says Denise Dresser, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, "the race did not end on Aug. 21. It began on Aug. 22."

In choosing Zedillo, Mexicans voted for stability. They had been badly frightened by a year of upheaval that began with the armed rebellion in Chiapas led by angry peasants and included political assassination and kidnappings of wealthy businessmen. Such fears helped the party in power, which offered security and familiarity even to the multitudes who have yet to share the fruits of economic reform. Federico Reyes Heroles, director of the magazine Este Pais, thinks that the split of just over half the votes for Zedillo and slightly less than half for the opposition "is a faithful picture of what the country feels like" -- wanting change but shrinking from it.

In the rural town of Ocoyocac, Felipe Eleno, 39, stepped out of a voting booth with his two-year-old son on his shoulders. "I support stability and democracy and tranquillity," he said. "So it's not too hard to guess who I voted for." Jorge Alaniz, a bank employee in Mexico City, was thinking about voting for the P.A.N. but stuck with the ruling party. "I thought Zedillo was a safe pair of hands," he said. "I just hope he can make the economy take off so my kids can have a good future." When Zedillo assumes office on Dec. 1, the country expects continuity from him, not dramatic new policies. Salinas has already pulled Mexico back from economic catastrophe with free-market policies, privatization and a fierce war on inflation. "On the economic side, Zedillo doesn't have to do anything at all," says Jonathan Heath, a Mexico City consultant. "We've already started a recovery." But of course, Zedillo does have to do something. His biggest task will be to turn his victory into good news for the poor. Ines Ramirez, selling flowers on a Mexico City street corner, says she voted for Zedillo. "He's a bit of a cold fish," she says, "but he was poor when he was young. Let's hope he doesn't forget us now that he's in power."

Zedillo will have to keep a grip on inflation but also push for economic growth. He will have to find ways to get more purchasing power to consumers, spreading the country's rising prosperity more evenly. If he cannot do it, the vote next time could produce real change: a President who is not from the P.R.I.

With reporting by Laura Lopez/Mexico City and Andres Martinez/San Miguel de Ocosingo