The big question for Gordillo is whether she will be able to marshal the PRI behind her in congress. It is worth noting that she only won when her sole rival, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the former governor of Sonora, withdrew after the first round. Gordillo won this (by 124 votes to 92, with three deliberate abstentions and five other no-shows), but not by the 70% that the rules demand. Beltrones won brownie points for his graceful withdrawal, especially after the fury of some of Gordillo's criticism of him in the run-up to the election.
Wrong
The snap, but erroneous, judgment from the Mexican commentariat was that Gordillo would find a way of forming an alliance with President Vicente Fox's Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) to get some of his reforms (on tax, energy and electricity and possibly labour) through congress. Her 124 first round supporters, plus the PAN's 153 congressmen, should make this alliance feasible. This will leave the beltronistas and the perredistas as a noisy but ineffective opposition, the argument goes.
On 13 August, Gordillo said that the PRI would not necessarily support the government's reform agenda. She said that the PRI would act as radical party in congress, when it reassembles on 1 September, pushing for changes to improve law and order, reduce unemployment and reform the expensive, state-financed electoral system.
Powerbase
Gordillo was backed by three important governors: those of the Estado de México, Veracruz and the party's northern bastion, Tamaulipas. They ordered their congressmen to vote for Gordillo. Beltrones argued that this authoritarianism goes against democracy. He also claimed that Gordillo's close relations with Fox mean that deals are likely to be done behind the party's back.
Gordillo is a typical priísta: the party is famous for extending itself to embrace its opponents. Gordillo, who made her name as a feisty leader of the teachers' union, the biggest union in Latin America with over 1m members, went out of her way to make links with non-PRI groups. Her latest political adventure took her to supporting President Fox's wife, Marta Sahagún, in her Vamos México project. This annoyed more narrow-minded priístas.
Gordillo, who has only just escaped being prosecuted for the murder of a dissident teacher in 1981, has a long record as a centrist. She was a prominent member of the Grupo San Angel, set up by Jorge Castañeda to midwife a transition between the PRI administration and a successor government. Vicente Fox, then governor of Guanajuato, was another prominent member of this group.
Gordillo's independence and friendly relations with the President and his wife pose a potential problem for Roberto Madrazo, the leader of the PRI and the party's likely presidential candidate for 2006. He would prefer the second half of Fox's term to be as much of a damp squib as the first half was.
Gordillo, who also harbours presidential ambitions, says that she wanted to show that the PRI could rule from congress. If she does this, she could become a presidential candidate for 2006.
Gordillo is also close to the deeply controversial former president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Her objections forced the then education minister, Ernesto Zedillo, to withdraw a revisionist history textbook, which took a more positive view of traditional `baddies' in Mexican history. Salinas has taken a significantly higher profile since the mid-term elections. He appears to have moved back to Mexico after spending most of the years since 1994 in self-imposed exile in Ireland. Salinas was even the subject of a New York Time' story in July in which he denied he had any political ambitions.
PRD leadership
Separately, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), picked Pablo Gómez, a former communist and student leader in 1968 and thus a veteran of Mexican jails, as its new leader in the lower chamber.
Gómez, who spent three years in prison after the bloody suppression of the student protests in 1968, started off as communist but has become an archetypical PRD insider, sitting on the national executive committee and holding important jobs, such as party leader and member of the Instituto Federal Electoral. He won the election for the leadership easily, by 56 votes to 39. His rival, Amalia García, is known to be more interested in succeeding Ricardo Monreal, the perredista governor of Zacatecas.
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