Mexican Congress Is Finally Installed

MEXICO CITY — After two weeks of intense battle, all-night sessions and concern by the ruling party that a canvass might never be finished, Mexico’s new, sharply divided Congress took office Wednesday, just in time to receive President Miguel de la Madrid’s final “state of the nation” speech today.

Members of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, breathed a sigh of relief, saying they had avoided a “constitutional crisis” by installing a Congress before the Sept. 1 deadline.

For the first time, public attention surrounding the president’s annual speech before Congress is focused not on what he will say, but on how opposition members of Congress might react.

The opposition, which makes up nearly half of the lower Chamber of Deputies, charges the government with fraud in the July congressional and presidential elections. The leftist National Democratic Front coalition and the rightist National Action Party were to meet late Wednesday to decide on a course of action for dealing with the speech.

Sources said possible responses include walking out of the traditionally somber presentation or “correcting” the president when they disagree with his version of events. Normally, a president’s sixth and last speech to Congress presents a glowing view of the accomplishments of his administration.

The opposition agreed to remove protesters camped on the steps of the Congress for the last two weeks so De la Madrid can enter the building to give his speech.

In a move to avoid public controversy, the officially declared winner, PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, said he would not attend the speech.

Lowest Vote Ever

Salinas was declared the winner of the presidential election with 50.36% of the vote, the lowest ever for a candidate of the PRI, which has ruled Mexico for nearly 60 years. The opposition’s unprecedented strength not only has fortified the role of Congress, but also has cast uncertainty over normally uneventful occasions such as today’s speech.

The opposition insists Salinas did not win and had argued that if he attended the speech, so should his challengers, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the National Democratic Front and Manuel J. Clouthier of the National Action Party, who has called for new elections.

Salinas has made relatively few public appearances since the vote, while Cardenas has launched a national post-election tour denouncing fraud. Cardenas told backers Tuesday that the PRI majority in Congress “was imposed by fraud.”

For the last two weeks the new Chamber of Deputies met as the Electoral College to ratify their own election, and their marathon sessions--sometimes lasting more than 22 hours--were stormy. The opposition twice walked out after a decision was made by a PRI-majority vote and at least once abstained from casting ballots.

The Chamber of Deputies is made up of 300 seats filled by direct election and 200 seats assigned to the different political parties according to a proportional representation formula.

The PRI officially won 52% of the congressional vote, giving it 260 of the 500 seats. During the canvass, the PRI lost five direct-representation seats but made them up again in the allocation of proportional seats. They conceded the challenged seats in negotiations with the opposition but refused to open packets of ballots to recount the votes. The vote count, therefore, remained the same and the PRI kept its 52%.

The 64-seat Senate also was inaugurated with four seats going to the Cardenas opposition. They are the first Senate seats the PRI has ever conceded.

The biggest battle, however, is only starting. The opposition now plans to challenge Salinas’ victory during the presidential canvass beginning next week.