RETURN OF THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT

By Michael S. Serrill

Just two years ago, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano was considered a political goner. After he nearly unseated the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) in 1988's apparently fraud-smeared presidential election, his star fell so fast that he finished a distant third in the 1994 contest for Los Pinos palace. Despite his illustrious pedigree--he lived at the palace in the 1930s, when his father Lazaro was one of Mexico's most popular Presidents--the more people saw of Cardenas the less they liked him. His ultraleft ideology was a turnoff, and his plodding campaign style made voters ready for a siesta.

But it's amazing what an image makeover--plus a very unpopular opponent--can do for a politician's fortunes. At age 63, Cardenas was back in the firmament last week as he and his Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.) wrested the Mexico City mayor's office from the P.R.I. by a vote of 47% to 26%, with the right-wing National Action Party polling 16%. Now Cardenas is once more being held up as the man who, in the presidential vote of 2000, can end the P.R.I.'s reign as the world's longest-ruling political party.

Of course, the P.R.D. might have won with almost any candidate, given the public's revulsion at alleged P.R.I. involvement in bribery, drug trafficking and even political assassination. "It simply was no longer logical for a Mexican to vote for the P.R.I., a party that has had a dark complicity with corruption," Cardenas told TIME.

He got a strong boost from the disintegration of the P.R.I.'s political infrastructure: the unions and local civic organizations that have traditionally delivered their votes, en masse, to the party. On the eve of the vote, some two dozen national unions, representing 2 million members, formed themselves into a new grouping called the Forum, severed their ties with the P.R.I. and told members to vote as they pleased.

According to exit polls, unions were joined in their disaffection by legions of young people, women, residents of public housing projects and even government workers, 58% of whom voted for opposition parties. "The P.R.I. couldn't hold them," said Daniel Lund, head of the polling firm Mori de Mexico. "The transition to democracy began at the popular level with these elections."

Cardenas didn't rely solely on the backlash against the incumbents. Like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair with a Spanish accent, he ran a slick multimedia campaign that moved his party toward the center and reassured Mexico City's middle class that he would do nothing to interfere with its newfound prosperity. Asked after the election whether he still advocated renegotiation of the NAFTA treaty and renationalization of privatized firms, Cardenas answered that "investors shouldn't worry too much about me, because the mayor has little to do with national economic policy."

But the President does. And though Cardenas says he will be too busy running one of the world's most congested cities to think about higher office, the assumption is that three years from now he will try once more to prove the son of a President can go home again.

--By Michael S. Serrill. Reported by Tim Padgett and Brendan M. Case/Mexico City

With reporting by TIM PADGETT AND BRENDAN M. CASE/MEXICO CITY