By William A. Orme Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, July 14, 1988; Page A21

MEXICO CITY, JULY 13 -- Mexico's Federal Electoral Commission tonight released results showing ruling party candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari winning last Wednesday's presidential election.

The official results gave Salinas 50.4 percent of the total vote that was cast and ruled valid. It was the lowest margin ever accorded a candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Finishing second, but in a stronger position than official sources had predicted, was leftist dissident Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, with 31.1 percent of the vote, according to the commission's figures.

The conservative National Action Party's candidate, Manuel Clouthier, came in third with 17.1 percent, the commission said tonight.

Cardenas, who stunned the PRI with his strong showing in the July 6 presidential vote, now faces the difficult challenge of forging his disparate electoral coalition into a permanent opposition force.

Before Salinas was declared the official winner tonight, both he and Cardenas had claimed victory. Supporters say the Cardenas victory claim stemmed not just from conviction, but also from the candidate's desire to hold his alliance together after the election. But skeptics say that its chronic infighting and underrepresentation in the new Congress -- which also was elected July 6 -- could dilute the new leftist opposition's impact on domestic and international policy.

The coalition's inability to agree on a unified congressional slate already has prevented it from capitalizing on a vote share that officials calculate at nearly 30 percent.

According to the commission's figures released tonight, opposition candidates won 51 of Mexico's 300 congressional districts. That figure was up from 11 in 1985. The National Action Party, which finished a distant third in the overall vote, carried 31 districts, while the Cardenas coalition parties won in only 20.

Cardenas' coalition plans a protest march here Saturday that will be its first post-election test of strength. But his backers appear to be uncertain about the next step for Cardenas' coalition: Should it formally reconstitute itself as a new party organization with a "Cardenista" label, or remain an amalgam of small parties and unregistered political factions with separate, often antagonistic political personalities?

"This was not just an election alliance," said Ifigenia Martinez, an apparently victorious Cardenas coalition candidate for the Senate, which has never had opposition members before. "I expect to go into the Senate as the representative of a very strong political group," she said, reiterating her intention to press for changes in the government's free-market economic policies.

"I don't think it is necessary for Cardenas to lead a new political party," Martinez added. "I think the parties will remain separate organizations with their own identities. There is no need to unite. We have a common front, and we have a leader."

Some political analysts, however, predict that once the memory of this month's election recedes, the pro-Cardenas factions will go their separate ways.

In a meeting yesterday, the four small left-of-center parties that backed Cardenas in last Wednesday's election agreed to coordinate future protest actions and to support common candidates in coming state and municipal elections.

Cardenas, citing his own election data and purported corroborations from government officials, asserted that the incomplete voting information showed him winning with 38 percent to Salinas' 36 percent.

The Cardenas parties must soon decide how far they are willing to go to fight for Cardenas' victory claim. At the end of August, winning legislative candidates are slated to take their seats in Mexico's new Congress. The candidates have the option to refuse to take their seats. If the victorious Cardenas candidates decide to be seated in the legislature, that move would constitute an implicit endorsement of the election's official results.

Ranging ideologically from the rightist-tinged Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution to the Marxist-based Mexican Socialist Party, the Cardenas coalition has yet to overcome its "internal contradictions and its rather archaic nostalgia" for Mexico's past, observed Octavio Paz, the poet and social critic.

In the center of the Cardenas alliance are two old leftist factions that had long backed PRI candidates in national elections: the Socialist Workers' Party, newly renamed the Cardenist National Reconstruction Front, and the Popular Socialist Party.

Jorge Cruickshank, the long-time leader of the Popular Socialist Party, said his party would only consider the option of refusing to take congressional seats "after profound analysis" and if all other coalition parties also agreed not to serve.

"Cardenas cannot ask the parties not to take their seats, because they won't do it," said Jorge G. Castaneda, a political analyst. He and other observers say the exigencies of Mexican electoral law and Cardenas' simultaneous needs for visibility and autonomy may force him to found a fifth party of his own. "The small parties are scared to death that Cardenas will go out on his own, because they know that is where the votes come from," Castaneda said.

Some observers question whether Cardenas, 54, a low-key civil engineer, can continue drawing support and votes for his parties unless he is on the ballot. Despite his unexpectedly impressive campaign performance, he remains unproven as a national political force. Critics suggest he may have benefited from the government's weakness, rather than from his own strength.