The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.26           July 28, 1997 
 
 
Ruling Party Suffers A Defeat In Mexico Election  

BY BARRY FATLAND
LOS ANGELES - The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for nearly seven decades, was handed a resounding defeat in the July 6 elections. In Mexico City voters elected Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solózano of the liberal bourgeois Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) with 48 percent of the vote. The capital has a quarter of the country's population and is the national center of politics, culture, banking and manufacturing.

This was the first time since the 1920s that residents of the Mexican capital were allowed to choose their mayor. Previous ones had been appointed by the president. The PRI candidate received 26 percent of the vote and the candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) received 16 percent.

Thousands of people celebrated the election results in the streets of Mexico City. Supporters of the PRD also rallied in front of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles.

Cárdenas, who was the PRD's presidential candidate in 1988 and 1994, focused his campaign on denouncing government corruption. The PRD leader said he would not take up "general economic policies" as mayor of the capital. His party speaks for a wing of the ruling class that stands to lose out from greater penetration of U.S. capital in Mexico and as a presidential candidate he campaigned for revising the North American Free Trade Agreement to give greater protection to the Mexican bourgeoisie. Many workers, therefore, have expectations that a PRD regime will act more in their interests than the PRI.

The months leading up to the elections saw strikes by teachers, sugar workers, and others, as well as protests against government austerity measures. Following the collapse of the Mexican currency at the end of 1994, unemployment and inflation shot up dramatically. Although the jobless rate has gone down since then, average real wages for industrial workers remain 20 percent lower than in 1993.

The PRD also won nearly all of the seats in the Mexico City legislature, a body similar to a large city council.

In nationwide elections for Mexico's lower house of congress, the House of Deputies, the PRI lost its majority for the first time. The ruling party won 39 percent, the PAN 27 percent and the PRD 26 percent - a jump from the 17 percent vote for the PRD in the 1994 presidential election.

The results were similar in balloting for the upper house of the legislature, the Senate seats, but as only a quarter of the seats were open for election the PRI will maintain a clear majority.

The PAN gained ground in several state elections, and now holds the governorship of 7 of the country's 31 states; the PRI holds the rest. Until 1989 all governorships were held by the PRI.

The main index of the Mexican stock market rose 2.1 percent the day after the election.  
 
 
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