Salinas Received Just 50.3% of Vote, Final Tally Shows

With all of Mexico’s voting districts reporting, government candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidential race with only 50.36% of the votes, according to government figures released late Wednesday.

His showing was by far the weakest in the six-decade history of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, whose strong leftist campaign ate into Salinas’ support, trailed with 31.12%. Conservative candidate Manuel J. Clouthier came in third with 17.07%.

Salinas’ bare majority appeared to reflect his willingness to accept a poor showing if it meant that the election would be seen to be clean. In a sense, he had to look bad to look good.

However, the tactic may well have failed. His foes continued to cry fraud. Moreover, key members of the ruling party who backed him were said to have been infuriated .

In the wake of Salinas’ victory, losses of legislative seats have upset labor leaders loyal to the PRI, as the party is called. Organized labor is a crucial PRI base of support and has been instrumental in keeping labor peace during six years of recession.

As a result, Mexico is entering an uncertain period of intense political maneuvering and potential turbulence, observers said Wednesday. Now, not only are opponents of the PRI refusing to accept the results as valid, but the party itself is struggling to keep from falling apart.

“The main worry is that social order might be threatened. No one exactly knows the mood of the people,” said Rafael Segovia, an expert on the ruling party and a professor at Colegio de Mexico. “The entire political panorama is undergoing a change.”

President Miguel de la Madrid, whose six-year term ends in December, seems to have his eye on possible violence.

“I pledge to take care that the remaining stages of the electoral process take place strictly within the law, seeing to it that public order, national sovereignty and the political freedoms of Mexicans are respected,” he told a group of lawyers this week.

By official count, Salinas won 9.6 million votes, Cardenas 5.9 million and Clouthier 3.2 million. The total means that less than half of the electorate turned out to vote.

Moreover, Salinas’ coattails were short: The PRI majority in Mexico’s 500-member Chamber of Deputies will be sliced sharply, and for the first time, opposition politicians will appear in the Senate. Many of the losses came at the expense of organized labor.

Salinas took pains this week to soothe his labor supporters. In what amounted to a late campaign promise, he told union leaders that he would raise salaries throughout Mexico--but he did not say when.

Meanwhile, Cardenas led a march Wednesday through Mexico City of several thousand supporters who again and again chanted, “Cuauhtemoc, president!”

Although opposition protests created the most post-election noise, the impact of the vote on the PRI may be more important in the long run.

Turmoil for Mexico?

The party was created to bring political peace to Mexico in the wake of the country’s revolution. The question now is whether it is disintegrating--and whether that, in turn, means turmoil for Mexico.

For six decades, the party governed without significant challenges. Many PRI members are unaccustomed to having to face the judgment of the voters and endure losses at the polls. It has never lost a governor’s race or the presidency.

Salinas is pressing party militants to give way in legislative races that they have clearly lost. In the past, such defeats could be reversed by stuffing the ballot box. But in urban centers, at least, the vote was closely monitored, and such a ruse would risk unrest.

Party insiders say that PRI losses set off a storm of protest among labor leaders, mainly from the Confederation of Mexican Workers, or CTM, a giant union that counts a membership of 4 million.

The union’s legislative candidates running on the PRI ticket lost in at least 10 of 51 races. One major labor leader, Joaquin Gamboa Pascoe, lost a Senate seat in Mexico City; one post in the Chamber of Deputies was lost by a nephew of Fidel Velasquez, the aging patriarch of the CTM.

‘Bosses Furious’

“The CTM bosses are furious,” a senior adviser to Salinas said. “It is humiliating for them to lose.”

A few labor leaders openly oppose giving up the seats. Leonardo Rodriguez, the secretary general of the electrical workers union, refused to concede losses in the state of Mexico, which borders Mexico City.

“In my state we won everything--the senators won, the president won. We won everything. Everything,” said Rodriguez, who ran and may have lost the Senate.

How the hard feelings will work themselves out is still unclear. Some labor leaders suspect that Salinas is trying to weaken the unions so he can employ conservative economic policies. Salinas, as budget and planning minister under De la Madrid, oversaw austere policies that resulted in a 50% drop in the living wages of Mexico’s working class.

“Honestly, Salinas is not pro-labor,” a close observer of the CTM said.

Velasquez, who has run the CTM for 40 years, discounted the chances that the PRI could do without organized labor. “The labor sector is a major part of the party,” Velasquez told The Times in an interview. “We are an organized force lacking in any other party.”

Some party analysts think Salinas is using the elections to purge labor leaders who might oppose his economic program as well as to remove some of his party’s more corrupt leaders.