The country’s former ruling party installed Roberto Madrazo as its new leader Monday, averting a rupture even as the organization suffered a setback in efforts to clean up its image as a corrupt political machine.
In a sign of reconciliation between candidates who last week were leveling bitter criticism at each other, Madrazo praised rival Beatriz Paredes during a swearing-in ceremony before 1,000 party loyalists.
Madrazo’s victory caps an intense struggle for the soul of the Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI, which lost its 71-year hold on Mexican politics in July 2000 when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party was elected president.
In the first election for the party leadership, Madrazo, 49, positioned himself as someone who could work with Fox. He criticized his party’s “obstructionism” over the past year.
Paredes, 48, struck a more independent and populist tone, saying among other things that globalization was an “exhausted” economic model.
The PRI had hoped the election, which took place Feb. 24, would give it a new, more democratic image, but widespread charges of irregularities–confirmed by teams of independent observers and academics who oversaw the polling–tended to reinforce its reputation for corruption.
“The door was blatantly open to abuses,” said Meghan Bishop, a researcher with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was with a team of poll observers in the state of Mexico.
Madrazo’s supporters were accused of stuffing ballot boxes in Tabasco and Oaxaca states, while they charged that votes were miscounted in the state of Mexico and other Paredes strongholds.
“Unfortunately, backward-looking and primitive segments within the party fraudulently distorted the vote … thus harming the process at a high cost for the PRI,” Paredes said in a statement published Sunday in newspapers.
A party commission voted 8-1 on Sunday to accept the results giving 1,518,063 votes to Madrazo, the former governor of Tabasco state, and 1,486,217 to Paredes, the former governor of Tlaxcala state.
