Mexican politics: The PRI's long tail ON MAY 7th Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico's president, showed off some of the fancy political footwork that days before had earned him the gushing endorsement of his first visiting head of state, Barack Obama. Flanked in the National Palace by leaders of Mexico's three main political parties, he resurrected an ambitious reform programme that a scandal in his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had threatened to derail. Notwithstanding finger-wagging by opposition leaders, Mr Peña persuaded them to restart a tri-party political pact that is the crown jewel of his five-month-old administration. On May 8th the pact was put into action when the government sent a package of bills to Congress to increase bank lending and competition. Next it hopes to liberalise the state-strangled oil industry and raise taxes broadly. Eventually, as Mr Obama succinctly put it, the aim is for Mexicans to make it through each day without paying a bribe. The scandal exposed how much danger to the reform process lurks in dark corners of Mr Peña's own party, which governed Mexico for most of the 20th century. For a few tense weeks, the pact was hijacked by allegations that senior members of the PRI in the eastern state of Veracruz were up to one of the party's oldest tricks. Damning video footage showed them apparently planning to use handouts from federal anti-poverty programmes - which one official called "gold dust" - to buy votes in upcoming local elections. They claimed in the video that this was what the National Action Party had done when it was in power before the PRI retook the presidency last year. Nevertheless, opposition parties sought prosecution for the PRI officials involved, and were mollified only when Mr Peña agreed to amend the pact, after having at first shrugged off the scandal. He promised to "armour plate" anti-poverty programmes from electoral meddling, prosecute any officials who abuse them in the run up to local elections on July 7th, and ban the distribution of goodies for 45 days beforehand. Veracruz is just the sort of sultry backwater where such a promise may be hard to keep. Always a PRI stronghold, it has in recent years become a haven for organised crime, with drug gangs frequently discarding corpses in public. Even before the latest uproar, scandals dogged the administration of its governor, Javier Duarte; last year prosecutors investigated the provenance of 25m pesos ($1.9m) in cash seized on one of his government's planes, before returning the money. Under his watch nine journalists have been murdered since 2010, more than in any other state. None of the killings has been convincingly investigated, says the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based advocacy group. None of those involved in Veracruz's alleged election conspiracy has so far been charged. But opposition leaders said they will insist on arrests if laws are broken in the run-up to July's elections. That could put Mr Peña at loggerheads with his party's old guard if they cannot play by the rules - or risk another schism in the pact. The next round of Mr Peña's reforms, which have already sought to bust taboos in education and telecommunications, is likely to affect areas that could directly challenge the PRI's grip on regional power. This is uncharted territory. Jorge Chabat of CIDE university notes that Carlos Salinas launched breathtaking economic reforms during his presidency of 1988-94, but failed to modernise the PRI. His presidency ended amid political violence and a brewing economic crisis. Now the proposed opening of the energy industry, which will hurt the pro-PRI oil workers" union, and the clampdown on electioneering, could mean Mr Peña will "crash headlong into the model of the old PRI," Mr Chabat says. The planned fiscal shake-up may have even deeper consequences. Héctor Aguilar Camín, an advocate of the reforms and editor of Nexos, a highbrow magazine, expects the fiscal overhaul to force state governments to take more responsibility for tax collection, which local chapters of the PRI may resist strongly. All the risks will be plain to see. All the benefits will be in the future," he says. A left-wing splinter movement headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a populist firebrand whose followers cherish many of the old PRI's totems such as oil nationalisation, could help stir up opposition. Yet society is more broadly in favour of reform than it was in Mr Salinas's time, which may help Mr Peña to override his opponents. Providing, that is, that when ordinary people realise that they, too, will have to pay higher taxes, their public spiritedness is not dampened.