MEXICO CITY — Amid the flood of final speeches and campaign-closing events here last week, this nation's newly independent Federal Election Institute saturated the airwaves with a broadcast message of its own. "Your vote is free. Your vote is secret," the public service messages declared several times an hour to millions of capital residents. "These elections are yours."
For Mexicans, today's vote also will be historic.
For the first time in more than 70 years, Mexico City voters will choose for themselves their City Council members and mayor, filling posts that previously had been appointed by the president.
This move alone will end seven decades of virtual one-party dictatorship in one of the largest cities on the globe--a period that spawned slogans such as "Democracy exists here in Mexico 364 days a year; it's only missing on election day."
But there is even more at stake than the powerful mayoralty of the capital, a contest in which opinion polls show left-leaning opposition figure Cuauhtemoc Cardenas far ahead in his bid to become Mexico's second-most-powerful politician and possibly its next president in 2000.
Nationwide, more than 52 million registered voters also could usher in yet another watershed of democracy by creating--for the first time in decades--a true balance of political power.
That's because voters in all 31 Mexican states will elect members in the 500-seat lower Chamber of Deputies. And polls show that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, could lose its legislative majority in the chamber for the first time since 1929.
A quarter of the seats in the Senate also are up for grabs, along with six state governorships, control in several state legislatures and scores of mayoralties.
The prospect of changes in all these levels of the Mexican polity, independent analysts and even President Ernesto Zedillo agree, makes the vote a probable turning point for Mexico as it conducts a virtual referendum on the PRI.
*
The elections will be the beginning of the end, some say, of the aging, decaying system the party has used to run Mexico through most of this century.
"These elections present the possibility for Mexico to make a peaceful change of its regime for the first time in our history," said Sergio Aguayo, whose Civic Alliance activist group will field thousands of poll watchers nationwide to help police prevent fraud. "This marks a basic transformation in the rules of the game, in how Mexico is governed and how power is shared. In that process, the PRI still has a place, at least for some time."
