Just three years after the celebrations of his historic victory, President Vicente Fox suffered a disappointing defeat at the polls Sunday as voters refused to give him more support in Congress for his promised reforms.
Midway through Fox’s 6-year term, an official quick count of the vote indicated that his ruling National Action Party would lose at least 44 seats in the 500-seat lower house of Congress to the opposition, led by the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
In a further setback, the PRI’s Jose Natividad Gonzalez claimed victory in his bid to take the key governor’s seat from Fox’s PAN in the border state of Nuevo Leon. In five other governor’s races, the PAN appeared to be winning in two.
The vote expressed Mexico’s disappointment with Fox’s inability to move the country forward and anger over a $500 million election campaign that many saw as empty and wasteful. It also revealed shifts in Mexicans’ political loyalties as the country adapts to a more authentic democracy since Fox ended the PRI’s autocratic, seven-decade reign in 2000.
About half of the nation’s 64million voters didn’t vote, and others refused to vote a party line for the first time. Voters could choose from more than a half-dozen new parties offering, among other candidates, a transvestite, athletes and other celebrities.
“I want a change that is really a change that we can see,” said Jorge Leon, 50, an umbrella vendor from Ecatepec who has not found steady work in 10 years. “I am inclined to try the small parties. The PAN has the same costume as the PRI.”
The election results will make it tougher for Fox to forge the changes he envisioned. His conservative PAN had been hoping to win a majority in Congress to overcome its failure to push economic reforms to create jobs and address Mexico’s stubborn poverty.
Officials from the Federal Election Institute said the PRI would gain as many as 20 additional seats in the lower house of Congress, building on its slim lead but falling short of an overall majority.
The biggest winner Sunday could be Mexico’s third-strongest party, the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, which appeared to increase its seats in Congress from 56 to as many as 100. Many credit that to the populist success of Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who most likely will be the party’s leading presidential candidate in 2006.
“It appears to me that the ones who voted for Fox in 2000, or at least against the PRI, stayed home [Sunday],” said Maria de las Heras, a Mexico City pollster. “The legislative agenda of Fox is not very popular.”
President concedes defeat
Fox conceded his party’s defeat in a televised statement just before midnight in which he said that voters’ wishes had been heard and that his government would seek compromises with the new Congress.
“I reiterate my will to work with the new representatives to construct the agreements that Mexico wants,” Fox said. “This is the mandate that we received today.”
The elections were largely peaceful, but in San Salvador Atenco, east of Mexico City, protesters closed some polling stations with fistfights and threats against electoral workers.
In southern Chiapas state, more than 200 Zapatista rebel sympathizers sacked voting booths, burned ballots and threatened journalists in an protest against the government. Two voters were shot and injured. There also were reports of 100 masked men trying to keep people from voting in Majomut.
Voting machine in gear
The PRI’s voting machine was still in evidence at polling stations throughout the country, including in this vote-rich city of 1.6 million northeast of Mexico City, where eight PRI “observers” in bright red T-shirts entered a tiny polling station outside the Francisco Villa market.
With PRI pins on their T-shirts, the platoon offered an obvious show of strength; the PAN, by contrast, had no one in attendance, while two PRD officials sat quietly off to the side, whispering and seemingly trying not to be noticed.
“Fox hasn’t done anything. It’s three years and all we have is pure promises, nothing more,” said Gabriel Victoria Ruiz, 39, one of the PRD observers, who belonged to the PRI until this year. “Little by little, the PRD is gaining ground.”
One loyalist voting for the PRI was Leonardo Perea Butanda, 73, a chauffeur who said the party helped him obtain a house in Ecatepec 23 years ago.
“The PRI has the experience. You can’t throw away the things they did in the past,” Perea said.
