NEWS ANALYSIS : Mexico Election Seen as Blow to Pluralism : Democracy: Lopsided results are attributed to the popularity of President Salinas. Critics say they reflect ‘illegitimate’ campaigning by the PRI.

MEXICO CITY —  In 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari won a tarnished presidential election with the smallest margin in the official party’s 60-year history. Faced then with unprecedented opposition victories in Congress, the beleaguered Salinas announced an end to what had always amounted to one-party rule in Mexico.

On Sunday, Salinas’ Institutional Revolutionary Party made a resounding comeback in mid-term congressional elections and that triumph is being attributed almost exclusively to the popularity of Salinas. But the president’s gain is a setback for political pluralism in Mexico.

“This election was a rupture in what appeared to be a transition to democracy,” said Carlos Ramirez, an editor and columnist at El Financiero newspaper. “The country returns to the days of one party.”

The PRI, as the ruling party is called, gained nearly 63% of the vote nationwide, according to unofficial results. With that, it wins at least 300 of the 500 seats in the federal Chamber of Deputies, including all of the seats from the federal district of Mexico City that were lost to the opposition in 1988.

The conservative National Action Party won about 18% of the vote, and the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party received just 8%--a dramatic decline from the 30% vote share that its leader, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a defector from the PRI, won in the 1988 presidential election.

The states of Mexico, Morelos and even Michoacan--Cardenas’ home state--also returned to the PRI in congressional contests after having voted for the opposition three years ago. The PRI has claimed victory in hotly contested Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi governorship races, but the opposition is challenging those results. Four other governorships at stake Sunday were won easily by PRI candidates.

The new Federal Electoral Institute’s inability to produce a promised quick count of the vote has ignited suspicions of fraud in the congressional election. Although the PRI appears to have won by a decisive margin in most cases, the burden of proof is on the government because of its checkered electoral past.

Government officials and party leaders say their victories were clean in every case. They say they ran better candidates this time than in previous elections and worked districts block by block to get out their voters.

“We won because we worked and they didn’t,” a high government official said. “This is not a return to the one-party system. It is a system where the opposition is divided.”

But government critics say the lopsided election reflects the “illegitimate” campaign practices of the ruling party. State resources were funnelled to the PRI, they said. There was a virtual blackout of the opposition’s campaigns in government and pro-government media, where PRI advertising was omnipresent. The PRI took voters to breakfast on the way to the polls in Guanajuato state and, opponents claim, coerced peasants into voting for the ruling party in San Luis Potosi.

“This was an election of a state party against opposition parties,” said historian Lorenzo Meyer, a columnist for the daily newspaper Excelsior. “The whole state apparatus was used in favor of the PRI.”

Salinas needed to win big to prove he had the majority of support that many doubted after his own narrow victory three years ago. Voters said they supported the president because he has stabilized the economy, installed public services and worked hard. He is viewed as tough by a country that appreciates a strongman.

Officials consider the election a vote of confidence for Salinas’ liberal economic program of selling state enterprises, opening the country to foreign investment and negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada.

In the next three years, Salinas is expected to ask Congress to alter laws that now limit foreign ownership in companies to 49% and give labor unions considerable power in the workplace. He also may seek laws permitting greater foreign investment in the national oil industry and privatization of communally owned farmlands.

Now, he can do so with a more docile Congress. Mexico’s Congress traditionally was a rubber-stamp for a powerful executive. After the 1988 elections, Salinas had to work with the National Action Party to win passage of constitutional reforms such as bank privatization and new electoral laws under which Sunday’s vote was conducted.

With its new, broad majority, the ruling party now could pass laws on its own or change the constitution with the votes of tiny satellite parties. Officials say, however, that to maintain credibility, the PRI must work to gain opposition support.

“Legally it is feasible to pass reforms with the small parties,” said the government official who asked not to be named. “But it would be very costly from the point of view of the public.”