GUADALAJARA, Mexico -- As a closing campaign act for elections today that will test Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo and his ruling party as never before, Eugenio Ruiz Orozco's final rally in the capital of the state of Jalisco had it all.
In the state where mariachi music was born, the would-be ruling-party governor had hired the nation's top two bands. Buses packed Guadalajara's Plaza Juarez with thousands of rural peasants. Trucks brought banners, chairs and a sound system to cover an acre. There were free lunches and free Cokes; free T-shirts, baseball caps, flags and buttons -- all bearing Mr. Ruiz Orozco's name.
But behind the scenes in the machine that has secured the vote for Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in hundreds of state elections during its 65-year grip on power, there were clear signs of fraying -- a glimpse of a historic transition that many analysts predict will begin unfolding on Mexico's political landscape today.
Subtly, it seemed, the gubernatorial candidate was distancing himself from his party. His latest flags didn't bear the party's name or symbol. His closing speech sounded more like those of the opposition than of the party in power: "We are going to win because we will build a new Jalisco that responds to the demands of the people, the women . . . the youth . . . an entire generation of frustration."
Until the moment he took the stage at the rally last week, it was unclear whether Mr. Ruiz Orozco even wanted the ruling party's national president, Maria de los Angeles Moreno, beside him. There were no references to Ms. Moreno in his prepared text; he ad-libbed several lines when she turned up, stressing her promise to radically reform the party that has presided over Jalisco's recent years of rising violence and unemployment.
The reason was in the numbers -- and in the local impact of unprecedented national economic and political crises just two months into a presidential term that Mr. Zedillo had vowed would usher in a new era of democracy.
As Mr. Ruiz Orozco staged his spectacle, his leading opponent, Alberto Cardenas Jimenez of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), was drawing thousands of supporters to a campaign run on a shoestring and selling campaign caps and cups for several pesos.
And the latest opinion polls show Mr. Cardenas and the PAN XTC winning 56 percent of the vote, to 36 percent for Mr. Ruiz Orozco and the ruling PRI.
Jalisco's is the first of four elections over the next few months in states where the opposition PAN -- the nation's second-largest party -- enjoys widespread support. A defeat here, party insiders fear, could bolster the opposition in the other states and ultimately confirm the dire predictions of those such as gubernatorial hopeful Alberto Cardenas, who flatly declared the PRI "a living corpse."
So great is the concern within the ruling party that last week Mr. Zedillo had to defend his reform policies before the party's national executive committee. "I want to say most clearly," the president told a leadership of skeptics and loyalists alike, "I refute those who think that the democratic mission of Ernesto Zedillo is to liquidate the PRI."
Even more urgently, today's elections will test Mr. Zedillo's commitment to electoral reform, his ability to enforce it and the strength of what the president billed as a "historic" national accord signed by the country's four largest political parties last month.
That pact is aimed at avoiding the post-election conflict that has violently polarized the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco.
Jalisco's long history of regional pride and recent years of growing resentment toward the federal government contributed to some of the worst of Mexico's violence. For Mr. Zedillo, this electoral test could not have come in a worse place.
It has been just three years, for example, since the streets of Guadalajara literally exploded. Gasoline leaking from an underground pipeline owned by the state oil company ignited on April 22, 1992, triggering a series of explosions that killed more than 200 people. The blasts shattered Guadalajara's confidence the federal government. No one has been convicted for what most Guadalajarans see as a state crime, and the federal government announced earlier this month that the case is closed.
Ruling party candidate Mr. Ruiz Orozco attempted to capitalize on popular insecurity during the campaign. "Jalisco wants certainty and confidence. Jalisco is not for experiments, and even less for invented tomorrows," he told the huge crowd at his campaign close, invoking the PRI's traditional appeal for security and the status quo. "We're going to win because Jalisco rejects extremist positions that lead nowhere."
For many analysts, the key to success in today's poll is the fairness and openness of both the vote and a counting process that will likely last well into Monday. Privately, even Mr. Zedillo's aides concede that the process itself and post-election peace are far more important to the president than which party wins.