The biggest party in congress, the PRI, won 224 seats and picked Elba Esther Gordillo, the powerful former leader of the teachers' union, and a chum of President Vicente Fox and his wife, as its party leader in the lower chamber of congress.
The PRD picked a former communist, Pablo Gómez, who was jailed after taking part in protests in 1968, as its leader. He is likely to be a powerful critic of the likely alliance between the 154 members of Fox's PAN and the Gordillo faction of the PRI.
Optimists hope that the new congress, the 59th, and the Gordillo-Fox axis will be able, somehow, to agree on the economic structural reform packages which the president proposed but failed to push through congress in the first half of his term . Realists are resigned to another wasted three years as the Fox administration fails to forge the alliances in congress it needs. The PAN's leader in the new congress is likely to be Francisco Barrio, a former governor of Chihuahua.
One major problem is that the senate, where a lot of the critics, even political enemies, of Fox and his government perch, can claim that it commands more of a mandate than the lower chamber, where the focus of the alliances has been. The senate was elected in 2000, along with Fox, on a much higher turnout of over 64%. In the mid-term elections just over 41% of the electorate bothered to vote.
If congress fails to achieve much this year, the focus of everyone's attention will shift to 2006. The two clear frontrunners for the presidency are both Tabasqueños: Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Roberto Madrazo. Both started out in the PRI. López Obrador is now the hugely popular mayor of Mexico City, while Madrazo is the president of the PRI.
The two faced each other for the governorship of Tabasco in December 1994 . López Obrador was, probably, defeated, but only after Madrazo broke almost every law on electoral spending.
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