New role for Mexico's once-mighty PRI - Yahoo! News: "New role for Mexico's once-mighty PRI

By Sara Miller Llana, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Fri Jul 14, 4:00 AM ET

MEXICO CITY - Whether the slim win of conservative Felipe Calderón is certified by an electoral court or leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador ends up ahead after his legal challenge runs its course, Mexico's disputed July 2 election has already become a tale of a polarized nation split along regional, class, and, now, party lines.
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The two rival presidential candidates split the country's 31 states and one federal district right in half, winning 16 each. Mr. Calderón's National Action Party (PAN) and Mr. Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) hold nearly opposite views on most issues, and each gained more legislative clout in Congress. Both have throngs of supporters convinced of their candidate's victory.

Such partisanship has stirred fears of legislative gridlock over the next six years, while dealing the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) a severe blow. But many analysts say that, in the new political landscape, a weakened PRI could ultimately help Mexico push through the labor, fiscal, and energy reforms that eluded President
Vicente Fox.

'[The PRI] is no longer a power broker, but a power seeker,' says Federico Estevez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. 'It makes for a Congress that will actually move legislation.'

Because the political story is still unfolding in Mexico, with no president-elect and the PRI recovering from a loss that tra"