By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Mar 13 2006 (IPS)

With four months to go to Mexico’s elections, leftwing presidential frontrunner Andrés López Obrador is still ahead of his rivals by a comfortable margin, while analysts predict that he will win, and many online bettors are putting their money on him.

The leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), to which López Obrador belongs, chalked up a historic triumph in the elections for local legislators and mayors held on Sunday in the state of Mexico, next to the capital.

According to the preliminary results, the PRD, which over the past decade has been the third strongest party in that district, is today contending for first place with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The two parties each garnered one-third of the vote.

The conservative governing National Action Party (PAN), previously the second strongest party in the state of Mexico, came in third.

“Sunday’s elections demonstrated that López Obrador can really draw votes. It looks as though he will be the next president of Mexico, barring unforeseen events, which cannot be ruled out,” political scientist Oscar Juárez told IPS.

López Obrador, who has pledged to reduce electricity rates and the price of petrol, and to cut the salaries of all civil servants, including the president’s, heads all of the polls for the Jul. 2 elections.

The 52-year-old López Obrador, a former member of the PRI, has the support of two small parties, Labour and Convergence, and has consistently led the polls for more than two years. He stepped down as mayor of the Mexican capital in July 2005 to run for president.

Some analysts call him a populist, and he has even been compared to Venezuela’s charismatic leftist President Hugo Chávez. But others, including ‘Subcomandante Marcos’, the leader of the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas, say he is just another representative of the “neoliberal” free-market status quo, with no genuine leftwing credentials at all.

At any rate, Juárez said, López Obrador can relax, “because he is heading for the presidential elections on a firm footing.”

The strength of the PRD presidential candidate is reflected not only by the opinion of most analysts, who believe it is unlikely that Calderón or Madrazo will catch up, but also by the attitudes of those who are literally willing to bet on a López Obrador triumph.

At the Internet political futures market firm Intrade, the PRD candidate is well in the lead.

To participate in the so-called “trading exchange for prediction markets”, bettors purchase a contract on a future event and negotiate it according to their hunches, or hold it until the deadline (in the case of Mexico’s elections, Jul. 1). If the candidate they backed is elected, they receive winnings based on the number of contracts and the amounts staked.

“If enough people speculate, this mechanism could indicate who will win on Jul. 2,” said political scientist Leo Zuckermann, of the Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics.

In the past, the Intrade web site has been used to trade contracts for the presidential elections in the United States. Now contracts are being offered for the selection of Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2008 presidential elections.

“In the coming months, we will see how the prediction market for the Mexican elections develops: whether the gap closes up, or remains as wide as it is now, when it’s predicting an easy victory for López Obrador,” Zuckerman said.

But López Obrador’s rivals are not discouraged. Calderón announced that he would make radical changes in his campaign strategy in the next few days, in order to overtake the PRD candidate, and Madrazo said he was preparing for victory.

According to Juárez, the only one who might still have a chance of winning is Calderón, but “it would be very difficult.”

Since February, the parties have been negotiating the holding of one or more debates between the candidates, but have not yet agreed on when or how many.

Calderón and Madrazo have proposed two to four debates, but López Obrador wants only one, and warns he may not participate at all, as he is sure that his rivals are out to “ambush” him.

A year ago, López Obrador said he was prepared to face his rivals in 10 different debates. But now that he “holds all the cards,” he doesn’t want to take any risks, Juárez said.

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