Monday, September 13, 2004

 

Veracruz a harbinger for 2006 Mexican elections

 

By Enrique Andrade González

 

The state of Veracruz has long been considered a bastion of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with a large number of votes always guaranteed to the party’s candidates during presidential elections.  It is also said that everyone born in Veracruz carries a government program under his or her arm, as politics is a cultural part of the state.

 

During the 71-years that the PRI governed Mexico two presidents came from Veracruz.  Miguel Alemán Valdés was president from 1946 to 1952 and Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who governed until 1958, succeeded him.  No other state in modern times matches this, which made old school politicians think of Veracruz as a politically privileged state and a breeding ground for PRI votes.

 

The current and well-respected governor is Miguel Alemán Velazco (PRI, 1998-2004), the son of Miguel Alemán Valdés and one of the richest men in Mexico.  As a past board member with Televisa, Alemán is influential with the Mexican television giant.  Too, he has long been involved in tourism promotion.

 

In the 2001 state midterm elections in Veracruz the PRI recaptured mayoral posts in a number of important cities that had been previously won by the National Action Party (PAN).  The PRI also held onto a majority of seats in the state unicameral legislature.

 

On these bases the PRI was expected to win the governorship handily this year, as well as a legislative majority and in most mayoralties.  So what happened in Veracruz on September 5, and why was the party’s win so questioned and so close?

 

Mainly it was due to an internal breakup in the PRI during the candidate selection process.  The chief aspirant, federal congressman Miguel Angel Yunes, lost the PRI candidacy to Fidel Herrera Beltrán.  As a result, not only did Yunes refuse to support Herrera, he resigned from the PRI and swung his support to the PAN.  Moreover, when this news broke nationally there was an immediate downswing in the polls, with the PRI advantage going from ten to less than two points.

 

Herrera, now the governor-elect, is a textbook product of political culture and a longtime PRI politician who, through local government “support” became an eleventh hour candidate.  Since he had been a pre-candidate in 1998, six years later the 55 year old was seen as a has-been compared to the PAN candidate, old for contemporary times, and a candidate without national renown.

 

With respect to the PAN, it was important for the party to win Veracruz, or to at least increase its political presence.  It accomplished the latter, thanks to the support of the federal government.  In fact, the social support activities carried out in Veracruz were anything but discreet, operations that were surely coordinated by Tomás Ruiz, director of the National Lottery; teacher’s union head Elba Esther Gordillo; and Yunes.  Proof of this was in protests by deputies heard during the State of the Nation Report by President Vicente Fox on September 1.

 

Convergence, the third political force in the state, also appears to have taken votes away from the PRI in rural areas and worker’s neighborhoods, showing that if the PAN and Convergence had formed an alliance they would have celebrated victory.

 

Although the results gave the victory to the PRI by slight margins, the truth is that while the party’s candidate won the governorship they lost the state.  The PRI will only have 13 of the 30 state legislature seats, it won only 71 of the state’s 212 municipalities, and it lost the important cities of Veracruz and Orizaba.

 

The fact that more than 60 percent of registered voters cast ballots shows that this was an electoral festival, and the people demonstrated their trust in the vote and in the political parties.  They also showed that they want to participate in order to say yes or no.

 

Perhaps the so-called “black vote,” the vote by oil workers in the Gulf of Mexico area, was what saved the PRI from total defeat in the state.

 

The lessons of Veracruz are definitive for the PRI if it intends to win in 2006.  And to do so, party leaders will obviously have to make a proper candidate selection and run a modern twenty-first century campaign.

 

The state machinery has now shown that it works and there are still two years to perfect it even more.  Mexico is now in an accelerated election mode, and the beginning of the operation took place in Veracruz on September 5.

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Enrique Andrade González (a www.mexidata.info columnist) is an attorney and Mexican business consultant with offices in Mexico City.  Lic. Andrade, who received his LL.M. in Constitutional and Protection (“Amparo”) Law from the Universidad Iberoamericana, is also a law professor at the Universidad Intercontinental.  His e-mail address is enriqueag@andradep.com.