With the muscle-flexing, Congress could derail President Vicente Fox's prized fiscal reform package. The change was brought by voters in July 2 elections, when Fox became the first opposition candidate in Mexico's history to be popularly elected. Also for the first time ever, no single party won control of either the Senate or the lower house, known as the Chamber of Deputies. The Institutional Revolutionary Party now holds only 211 of the 500 seats in the lower house, and lost the majority it used to hold in the 128-seat Senate. Fox's National Action Party has 207 seats and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party has 51 in the chamber.
Smaller parties hold the remaining seats.
With more debate and little certainty as to how the congress will vote, lawmakers are the focus of daily newspaper articles. They are going from field hockey to ballet. When the Zapatista rebels came to Mexico City to push for passage of an Indian rights and autonomy bill, they turned down Fox's offer for a meeting and pushed reluctant lawmakers to hear them, threatening to return to Chiapas if they weren't given the floor of Congress. They eventually were allowed to speak, pleading with legislators to approve the Fox-backed bill. The president did not attend the session out of respect for Congress' independence.