PRI leader rules out purge of old guard

The leader of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), which held power for more than seven decades until 2000, has ruled out any possibility of a purge to remove the old guard.

Beatriz Paredes, who took over as party leader this month, admitted in a recent interview that combating the PRI’s image of corruption was an important step in returning to the presidency in 2012. But she said she would seek other means to improve its reputation with Mexico’s voters. 字串3

“In political systems where purges have taken place, the results have generally not made things better,” she said.

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Many voters had hoped that under Ms Paredes, a 53-year-old party veteran with a stellar political record, the PRI would start to expel several prominent members whose names, rightly or wrongly, have become synonyms for corruption in the minds of many Mexicans. A poll by El Universal, the daily newspaper, showed that Mexicans continue to view the PRI as a highly corrupt political organisation. 字串7

Political analysts say that that perception goes a long way to explaining its dismal performance in last year’s presidential race.

The PRI dominates more local legislatures than any other party and continues to have the largest number of governors, but Roberto Madrazo, the party’s presidential candidate in last July’s vote, failed to come first in any of the country’s 31 states. 字串8

Since that defeat, the movement that used to lord it over Mexico in a way that Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, once described as “the perfect dictatorship”, has suffered a series of internal wrangles and a vacuum that has caused the influence of its once-centralised power structure to ebb towards PRI state governors and congressional leaders.

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In spite of Ms Paredes’ refusal to adopt drastic measures to turn the party’s fortunes round, she accepted the need to transform its image if it wanted to do well in legislative elections in 2009 and in the presidential election three years later. 字串4

One step in that transformation, she said, was to take the party’s ideology to the left. “My proposal is that the PRI embraces social causes . . . with 30m people living in poverty and abstention levels of 40 per cent, I don’t think Mexico is a rightwing country.”

She also said she would improve the PRI’s image not by dwelling in the past – “You can’t judge the PRI of yesterday against the PRI of today” – but by introducing a series of measures to shed light on its inner workings. One change, she said, would be to introduce transparency into the party’s fund-raising activities as well as its finances. “We need to re-evaluate ethics,” she said.