Mexico & Nafta - 12 October 2004

The issue of whether spouses should be able to succeed their partners is stirring up passions in the country, even though Marta Sahagún, the wife of president Vicente Fox, has repeated her statement, that she does not want to run for the presidency in 2006. The Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) said on 5 October that it was undesirable for spouses to succeed one another in elected executive positions.

The statement, by the president of the IFE, Luis Carlos Ugalde, comes at a time when the issue is preoccupying a lot of Mexicans. The leftwing party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, got itself into a tangle when Maricarmen Ramí­rez, the wife of the current governor of Tlaxcala won the primary for the PRD nomination to succeed her husband. The PRD's national executive was deeply unhappy about this and tried to replace her. She was vindicated by the top electoral court and the PRD, grudgingly, accepted her as the party's candidate.

There is still a lingering uncertainty over whether Marta Sahagún, the wife of President Vicente Fox, will decide to run for the presidency in 2006. She has repeatedly said that she will not. Most recently in late September when the electoral court upheld Ramí­rez's right to run. Sahagún called for a national debate on the issue.

Kicking off this debate, Ugalde said that the electoral law should be clarified, which would involve constitutional as well as legal reform. Ugalde admitted that the issue was tricky because on one side there was the principle that everyone should have the same rights but on the other there was the principle of fairness: spouses clearly had an edge over potential rivals.

Under the law as it stands, upheld by the supreme electoral authority in the Tlaxcala case, spouses can succeed each other and most relations (with the notable exception of sons succeeding fathers) can succeed each other. Ugalde said that he felt that there was a consensus in the country that family succession was undesirable and that congress should do something about it.

The pickle the PRD got itself into in Tlaxcala was almost comical. At one point in early September the national executive of the PRD was opposing its official candidate, Maricarmen Ramí­rez, and committed not to running a candidate in alliance with Convergencia in the forthcoming election. Her candidacy was supported by the top electoral authority in the country, the Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial and quite a considerable slice of the local PRD. All 14 perredistas standing for the local congress are, for example, behind her. The party machine in the state, however, is behind Gelacio Montiel Fuentes, a federal deputy, whom Ramí­rez beat in the primary. He appealed to the national PRD to cancel her candidacy because her husband was the state governor. 

The PRD's national committee eventually overruled its national executive on 3 October and reinstalled Maricarmen Ramí­rez as the party's candidate. The vote was 103 to 73. The committee also asked Alfonso Sánchez Anaya, the current governor and Maricarmen's husband, to resign. He has consistently refused to do so. 

The row in Tlaxcala means that the PRD is in lose-lose position. If Maricarmen wins, it will have been without much help from the party. If she loses, it will be because the party undermined her. The only comfort for the PRD is that the other parties are equally split: a dissident Prií­sta is running for the PAN and so should take votes away from the PRI candidate, Mariano González Zarur, who won the senatorial selection in 2000. It is worth remembering that Sánchez Anaya himself is a defector from the PRI.

The crisis in Tlaxcala and the hamfisted way the PRD's president Leonel Godoy tried to sort out the problem has weakened his position. Godoy made no secret of his belief that Maricarmen should not run. He had threatened to resign if he was defeated on the issue. 

Third case
Martha Elena Garcí­a became the third woman to announce that she would seek to succeed her husband in an executive post. Her husband is Antonio Echeverrí­a, the governor of the state of Nayarit. What is significant about Nayarit is that Echeverrí­a, from the Partido Acción Nacional, beat the incumbent Partido Revolucionario Institucional in 1999 after being backed by all the main opposition parties. The next gubernatorial election in the state is due on 3 July 2005.