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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2005 
Mexico's Largest Party Decides On Open Primary, Puts Off Battle Over Leadership
 John Rice - Associated Press
| | President of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Roberto Madrazo raises his arms with newly elected Governor of the State of Mexico Enrique Pena Nieto, left, during a meeting of the PRI leadership in Mexico City. (Photo: AP) |
Mexico City – Mexico's largest party decided Tuesday to let all Mexicans vote in a primary for the candidate who will try to recover the presidency the party lost for the first time in 2000.
But the feuding leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party put off a decision on who will guide the party itself through the campaign for the July 2, 2006, national election.
It will be the first time in its 76 years that the party known as the PRI will run a presidential campaign while out of power.
The party's 1,200-member National Political Council set no date for the primary, but Sen. Genaro Borrego said it would probably be in the first days of November.
With time running down ahead of the election, the council also put off another key decision: How, and with whom, to replace current party chief Roberto Madrazo.
He had promised to step down on Tuesday in order to campaign for the presidency, but accepted an appeal forged by party leaders for him to stay on for a few more weeks to help resolve a feud over his successor.
Even so, hundreds of supporters leaped to their feet with cheers of "Madrazo! Madrazo!" when the former Tabasco governor reasserted his vow to seek the presidency.
He asked his rivals for the nomination to show fairness in their campaigns while his party duties restrict his ability to campaign himself.
"We want to win the presidency of the republic," Madrazo told them. "Everything else is secondary."
He also boasted of the party's survival and resurgence after the stunning loss of the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox and the conservative National Action Party.
"We have passed through troubled waters," he said. "But this ship is still intact."
Still causing turbulence is a fight over party Secretary-General Elba Esther Gordillo, a powerful union leader who, under party bylaws, is supposed to succeed Madrazo.
Some party leaders have openly called her a "traitor" because of her friendship with Fox and allegations that she sometimes has used her legions of teachers to work against the candidacies of PRI rivals.
Some of her followers are forming a new party based on the teachers union.
Once an ally of Madrazo, Gordillo later feuded with him and saw herself pushed out of the leadership of the PRI delegation in Congress in a bitter dispute within the party.
Under a tentative agreement worked out with a delegation of party leaders, Gordillo is supposed to assume the PRI leadership in late July or early August, when she returns from San Diego, California, after treatment for unspecified health problems.
Sen. Dulce Maria Sauri said Gordillo likely would then serve 60 days before being replaced by the National Political Council. That would let her oversee most of the party primary campaign, but not the primary itself.
Some Gordillo partisans, however, want her to lead the party through the 2006 election.
The PRI was created in 1929 to govern Mexico and the president was its unquestioned leader until Fox's victory.
Yet the PRI holds more governorships and seats in Congress than any other party and remains Mexico's only true nationwide political force. |
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