For a lesson in democracy, look to Mexico
Americans looking for answers as to how a hotly contested election can be peacefully settled even when the loser is determined to stay in power need look no further than their neighbor just to the south, Mexico.
In 2000, an upstart former businessman-turned-politician barnstormed Mexico, promising to oust the Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, which had ruled the country for 71 long years by doling out patronage, subsidizing friendly media organizations, paying voters to attend rallies and vote the party ticket, and brazenly manipulating election results.
Vicente Fox, who ran Coca-Cola’s Mexico operations before serving in Congress and becoming governor of Guanajuato state, was a straight-talking rancher who caught the imagination of Mexican voters as he campaigned in blue jeans and cowboy boots. The 6-foot-4 Marlboro Man lookalike promised to use those boots to kick the PRI out, and voters responded enthusiastically. Perhaps a businessman could solve Mexico’s long-standing problems of boom-and-bust economic cycles, many of them thought. Others simply relished the prospect of a president who didn’t hail from the long-ruling, hopelessly corrupt PRI.
I accompanied Fox on several of his final campaign swings through Mexico, when tens of thousands of cheering supporters would line the streets of villages and major cities alike, swarming his bus as he arrived for rallies. No one had to pay them to attend; their excitement was palpable. They wanted change; they wanted an end to corruption, impunity and incompetence.
Polls in Mexico were notoriously unreliable at the time; citizens who had little reason to trust the electoral process were reluctant to tell pollsters how they intended to vote. But as election day approached, internal polls indicated Fox had a good chance of beating Francisco Labastida, the PRI candidate, who was uninspiring but was propelled by the vast resources of the PRI and of the government itself. In Mexico, presidents can only serve a single, six-year term, and sitting President Ernesto Zedillo, a career technocrat with a PhD in economics from Yale who had successfully steered Mexico to recovery following the disastrous 1995 financial crisis, was watching quietly from the sidelines.
Zedillo was determined to steer Mexico to a safe political landing as well. He wanted to avoid, at all costs, a repeat of Mexico’s 1988 presidential election: that year saw a closely fought contest between Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of a revered former president who had quit the PRI and was running as the candidate of a coalition of six leftist parties; Manuel Clouthier, of the center-right National Action Party; and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the PRI’s man. On election night, when an early vote tally showed Cárdenas ahead, the federal government’s new election computers mysteriously “crashed” for 4½ hours. When the computers were up and running again, a few hours later, Salinas was on top again, and he immediately claimed victory. It took a full week for official results to be announced, and Salinas was declared the victor with 50.4 percent of the vote, compared to Cárdenas’ 31.1 percent. As reports spread of burned ballots and stolen ballot boxes, Cárdenas declared he was actually the winner; other opposition leaders called for the election to be annulled and staged street demonstrations and hunger strikes. It would be more than a month before the PRI-dominated Congress, acting as the electoral college, rubber stamped Salinas as president. He would spend the first few years of his presidency attempting to establish legitimacy with voters who believed the election was brazenly stolen.
Zedillo, Salinas’ successor, wanted no such shenanigans in the 2000 presidential vote. He was an accidental president himself, having become the PRI’s standard-bearer only because its candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated while campaigning in 1994, an indication that the PRI was rotting from within. Although Zedillo had joined the ruling party as a young professional, it was largely because in what was essentially a one-party state, membership was required for civil servants who aspired to climb the career ladder.
On election day, July 2, at 8 p.m. the country’s two major TV networks projected a Fox victory. At PRI headquarters, worried party honchos gathered and schemed to delay the results until they could somehow be turned around. Although the country had invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build an independent electoral commission and modernize its voter registration system, including voter ID cards featuring tamper-proof holograms, skeptics feared the PRI might have one last electoral trick up its sleeve.
But Zedillo would have none of it: Just moments after the Federal Electoral Institute announced official results showing Fox had won, Zedillo went on nationwide television and preemptively conceded on behalf of Labastida and the PRI. After seven decades running the country as its fiefdom, the PRI was powerless to push back. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans danced in the streets into the early hours of the morning, celebrating the fairest elections ever held in Mexican history.
“We have shown that ours is now a mature democracy, with solid and trustworthy institutions and especially with citizens who have a great civic awareness and sense of responsibility,” Zedillo said that night. That was especially true of him.
Those of us who covered Mexico’s historic 2000 elections were deeply impressed by the steps the country took to modernize the electoral system and to educate voters on their rights, which led to confidence that the vote-counting process would be fair and honest.
Perhaps the tables have turned, and it is the United States that would do well to take some tips from our neighbor to the south. Although Mexico continues to struggle with corruption and violence — some may argue these problems have worsened since 2000 — the peaceful transfer of power did help the country become a true, multi-party democracy.
Modernizing voting technology throughout the United States, as Mexico did, would be a big step in the right direction toward boosting citizens’ confidence. But responsible political leadership is essential: come what may this week, one can only hope that leading Republicans and Democrats will exhibit the same spine that Zedillo did, acting quickly to recognize the legitimacy of the election results once votes have been counted, so that the United States can begin healing its own, bruised democracy.