Former President Vicente Fox, who ended the PRI's 71-year rule in 2000, is now urging Mexicans to support the PRI candidate for president.
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
MONTERREY, Mexico — Vicente Fox exulted in victory 12 years ago over the autocratic, often corrupt party that ruled Mexico for 71 years, sipping Champagne from a balcony overlooking supporters euphoric over the arrival, finally, of true democracy.
“The citizens have made a decision that we all should respect,” declared Mr. Fox, the president-elect, not long after the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, went down in a stunning defeat.
Now, as the PRI appears on the verge of returning to power in Sunday’s presidential election, Mr. Fox, whose presidency ended in 2006 without many major reforms, is urging Mexicans to “close ranks” behind the PRI nominee, Enrique Peña Nieto, who has a comfortable lead in the polls, and to put aside fears they might have about a party that was known for its authoritarian ways.
The return of the PRI would be a stunning development in a country that issued such a firm good riddance to the party in 2000 when it elected Mr. Fox. One explanation for the possible about-face is that Mexicans have learned after enduring more than a decade under the National Action Party governments of Mr. Fox and the current president, Felipe Calderón, that the PRI was not the source of all their woes.
With Mexicans frustrated with violence and an underachieving economy and generally feeling that the country should be further along than it is, analysts say a nostalgia has developed for the perceived protection and stability of yore. Mexicans are grasping for change, even if it means choosing a party, an amalgam of left, right and centrist positions, with a questionable past.
If the ouster of the PRI was heralded as a milestone step in the country’s move toward democracy, some now contend that a return to the PRI may one day be looked back on as a critical sign of the country’s democratic maturation. Mexico’s institutions are no longer rigged to ensure that one party stays around forever, experts say. Candidates rise and fall now on issues and voters’ perceptions of their lives.
“The PRI always looked after the people even if their ways were not always right,” said Eduardo Martínez, 36, a factory worker who caught a Peña Nieto T-shirt and cap thrown at the candidate’s last rally here on Wednesday. Mr. Martínez said he was still not sure who would get his vote, but like the many Mexicans who have given Mr. Peña Nieto a comfortable lead in the polls, he seemed willing to look past the party’s darker elements.
“You have to understand this is Mexico,” he added. “They all rob; they all steal. But if Peña can bring more jobs and more security, he will win.”
So deep is the anti-incumbency mood and the sense that the two past presidents squandered their opportunity to break up monopolies and overhaul other vestiges of the PRI era that voters like Marilyn Salazar, 26, who voted for Mr. Calderón in 2006, are opting for the PRI this time. She was 14 when Mr. Fox ousted the PRI and has none of the visceral hatred that many in older generations may still harbor for the PRI.
“Peña Nieto is young like me, and I just think he can bring more jobs and better pay,” said Ms. Salazar, who sells homemade potato chips from a cart here and conceded her views came from the gut, not from a close study of the candidates.
The PRI is embedded in the Mexican psyche like no other party. It sprang from the Mexican Revolution and spawned oligarchies that effectively controlled banks, the national oil company, the media, governors and mayors, the state job mill and, to a large degree, crime bosses. Its despots, some iron-fisted, some benevolent, suppressed democracy and dissent while enabling the country to grow and modernize.
When their grip began to crumble is disputed. A succession of economic crises beginning in the 1970s, the mishandling of the response to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the flowering of democracies around the world all set the stage for the PRI’s downfall in 2000.
But like a fading tropical storm that rebuilds into a raging hurricane, it steadily regained strength at the local level and now controls 20 of 31 states. It controls half of the country’s 2,400 counties, employing some of its time-honored tactics to lure supporters.
In Nezahualcóyotl, a working-class suburb outside Mexico City that the PRI won in 2009, a party functionary recently boasted of giving away toasters and stoves on Mother’s Day, arguing in an interview, “That’s what we do — we help people.”
The question Mexicans are now asking is whether a victory by the party that had earned the nickname “the perfect dictatorship” would be a step back or a step forward in a 12-year-old democracy with ample growing pains.
Enrique Krauze, the Mexican historian who called the PRI era the “imperial democracy,” said he doubted that the party had changed; he, like other analysts, believe that the old guard is hiding behind young upstarts like Mr. Peña Nieto. But he said Mexico had evolved, enough to keep the party’s abuses and excesses in check, or at least more likely to be exposed.
“If the PRI wins on Sunday, they will find themselves in a new country,” with a more questioning press, watchful civic organizations, social media scrutiny and real political opposition, he said in an interview.
That has played out in the campaign, which has provided ample reminders of the PRI’s unsavory past. A former governor in Tamaulipas State, on the Texas border, is suspected of ties to drug traffickers, while a national party chairman gave up his post in December after revelations of a sudden, questionably large debt that swelled in Coahuila, the northern state he served as governor.
Mr. Peña Nieto has vowed not to make deals with crime groups, as the PRI was accused of doing in the past to keep the peace. He has promised to focus on cracking down on murder, kidnapping, extortion and other violent crimes, rather than singling out kingpins, as Mr. Calderón has.
Still, Mr. Peña Nieto, whose political network in the party goes back generations, has governed and campaigned in a way reflective of the party’s style.
As governor of Mexico State, the most populous, and a mix of poor, middle-class and prosperous suburbs ringing Mexico City, he emphasized public works projects and ribbon-cuttings, faithfully covered by Televisa, the largest national broadcaster, and often in the company of its stars. He married one in November 2010.
He and party leaders said the PRI had learned from its mistakes. Privately, as much as they wince at the scandals, they point out that those episodes have been widely covered in the Mexican press, something the old PRI would have stanched by paying off or intimidating publishers.
Mr. Peña Nieto said he would appoint an anticorruption commission and take other steps to ensure a clean government, but he has also vociferously defended the party, dismissing criticisms as the work of desperate political opponents. In a true democracy, he said in an interview, the PRI had to come back.
“How would it seem to you that if the Republicans ever came back it would be seen as a regression of democracy?” he asked. “Parties participate in democracies, compete in democracies, and so they alternate.”
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