Fox’s Candidate Ahead in Yucatan

MEXICO CITY — In the first major election since President Vicente Fox took office, an alliance led by his National Action Party appeared headed toward victory Sunday in the Yucatan state governor’s race, according to a vote sampling released by the government election commission.

Patricio Patron, a federal senator from Fox’s party who has the backing of a four-party alliance, led Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Orlando Paredes by 49.5% to 47.5%, according to a sampling of about 11% of votes counted.

The sample seemed at variance with exit polls, including those by both national television networks, that indicated Patron was winning by a wider margin. The official count is expected Wednesday.

Amid driving rainstorms that kept polls from opening on time in the southern state, voters took part in a pivotal test for Paredes’ party, known as the PRI, and its hopes of rebounding after losing to Fox in July’s historic presidential election. Sunday’s election was seen as a referendum on the nationally popular Fox in a state that has known nothing but PRI domination for 70 years.

The Yucatan vote concluded an ugly electoral war between the PRI and the alliance led by Patron’s party, known as the PAN. For months, PRI political boss Gov. Victor Cervera Pacheco provoked a tense constitutional standoff by defying a federal order to seat a bipartisan election council. He finally acceded to a Supreme Court order in early April.

In defying the federal order, Cervera attempted to whip up local feelings of “sovereignty” in the face of what he said was federal interference. Fox’s decision not to campaign for Patron was a sign that the issue is a delicate one, said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

The campaign was controversial up to the end, with the PAN accusing Cervera’s machine of engaging in old-style paternalism: buying votes with bicycles, appliances and bags of concrete. PAN leaders accused the PRI of distributing confusing leaflets Sunday instructing Patron supporters to vote four times on the same ballot.

Aided by a statewide economic boom and Cervera’s Santa Claus image with many peasant voters, the PRI was counting on a victory to shift political momentum its way after last summer’s devastating loss of the presidency.

Estevez said the PRI had the odds stacked in its favor with a popular governor and 7-decade-old party machinery in place. But the apparent defeat of the PRI would be the second at the hands of a PAN-led alliance candidate. In August, multi-party alliance gubernatorial candidate Pablo Salazar swept to victory in Chiapas.

Paredes tried unsuccessfully to leverage discontent with Fox’s controversial fiscal reform package, which would extend the 15% value added tax to food, medicine, books and private school tuition.

PRI leaders accused the PAN of playing politics three days before the election by arresting Mario Villanueva, the fugitive former governor of Quintana Roo state, in the Yucatan Peninsula resort city of Cancun and thus encouraging suspicions that Cervera somehow aided Villanueva in his flight. Villanueva faces Mexican drug trafficking charges and could be extradited to the U.S.

“It’s very suspicious that the federal attorney general is administering justice in favor of the PAN,” said PRI national president and former Yucatan Gov. Dulce Maria Sauri after casting her vote.

Some ugly scenes at the polls were reported, with PRI president Sauri casting her ballot amid catcalls and insults from PAN supporters while PRI partisans allegedly made death threats against some PAN election observers in the small towns of Izamal and Tizimin, said Rodrigo Menendez, general director of La Revista, a weekly newsmagazine based in Merida.

Cervera is seen as one of the last of a dying breed, the old-style party boss who dispenses government largess to win political power, said George Grayson, government professor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The election was a lose-lose proposition for the PRI, he said.

“If they lose, then that undermines the party’s base, which is now the south of the country,” Grayson said. “If they win, it will be as a result of the success of a dinosaur-like governor’s ability to blatantly employ traditional practices of vote buying, of using government resources to gain favor with the electorate.”