Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ELECTIONS-MEXICO: Long-standing Divisions Flare Up with a Vengeance

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jun 7 2006 (IPS) - Analysts have no doubt that on Jul. 2, Mexicans will elect as their new president one of two candidates with radically different personalities and plans. They epitomise the historical dichotomy between liberals and conservatives, revolutionaries and reformers, left and right.

After the second and final debate between the five presidential candidates, held on Tuesday night, opinion polls and observers predicted that the next head of state would be Felipe Calderón of the governing conservative National Action Party (PAN), or Andrés López Obrador of the leftwing opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

According to historian Manuel Villalpando, the candidates represent the profound ideological differences present throughout Mexico’s history, and also reflect the wide, unbridged social inequality gap that persists in the country, where 40 percent of the population of 103 million people are poor.

Over the last century, political and armed struggles between liberals and conservatives have claimed thousands of lives.

>From 1929 to 2000, the friction between the two sides was eased and managed relatively successfully by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed without interruption during that period until it had to relinquish power to Vicente Fox of the PAN.

But now, with the PRI no longer in government and with virtually no chance of election for its presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, the differences are emerging again with a vengeance.

However, this is happening in the context of elections organised by independent institutions, with rules accepted by all of the political parties and under the scrutiny of observers, conditions that did not prevail until the 1990s.

In Tuesday’s debate, the format, timetable and date of which had been previously agreed by the parties, the spotlights were on the PAN and PRD candidates.

According to a telephone survey in which the newspaper Reforma interviewed 480 people all over the country who had watched the debate, Calderón was the winner with a 44 percent approval rating, followed by López Obrador with 30 percent and Madrazo with 11 percent.

Another poll, carried out by the private Monitor-MVS media group, indicated that López Obrador came first with 56.4 percent, followed by Calderón with 36.9 percent. The method in this survey was to ask viewers and listeners to dial a telephone number to register their vote.

“Post-debate surveys can be misleading, but there is no doubt that the PRD and PAN candidates were the winners, and this is consistent with the mass support they have both commanded in previous polls,” Alberto González, an independent political consultant, told IPS.

In surveys measuring voting intentions for the Jul. 2 elections, Calderón and López Obrador are running neck and neck with 30 percent each. The rest of the voting intentions are shared between Madrazo of the PRI, Patricia Mercado of Alternativa and Roberto Campa of the New Alliance.

When voting preferences are broken down by region, the results show that most of the voters in the north of the country – the richest area û support Calderón, while those who live in the centrally located capital city, and in the south, support López Obrador.

“The elections on Jul. 2 will be very close-run, but we all hope that, whatever the difference between the two leaders, the final result will be accepted without objections,” said González.

Calderón, 43, is a Harvard-trained lawyer and economist and former energy secretary, as well as a lawmaker and president of the PAN. In the debate he put himself forward as the candidate of dependability, peace, respect for the law and stability.

He said that he would organise a coalition government with the opposition, and would continue to follow the current administration’s route of free-market competition.

He promised to encourage foreign investment, and promote wide-ranging legal reform to “modernise” the labour, tax and energy sectors. He also said that he would make Mexico a key player in all international forums.

López Obrador, 52, is a graduate in political science who has worked in state organisations dedicated to the interests of indigenous peoples, has led social protest demonstrations, and has also been president of his party and mayor of the capital.

In the debate, he mapped out quite a different route, saying the prevailing economic model was not working, and that the July elections are between two diametrically opposed visions for the country. He promised that his efforts would be entirely directed at eradicating the poverty and social inequality that exist in Mexico.

The PRD candidate proposed limiting free competition, revising the free trade treaties signed by Mexico, delivering aid in money and in kind to the poor, and demanding that “the rich and powerful” behave according to the dictates of a social conscience.

On the reforms that the business community and the Fox administration have tried unsuccessfully to bring about in the last six years in sectors like energy and labour, López Obrador’s position was that it was not necessary to continue to push for them, because in his opinion the plans would only favour the rich.

With regard to criticism of current legislation, which was mentioned by Calderón, he said nothing during the debate. However, in 2003, when he was mayor of Mexico City, he declared that “unjust laws are no use. The law is made for man, not man for the law.. Laws that do not ensure justice useless.”

On foreign policy, his view was that Mexico should not take on any leading role, and ought to curb its activism.

In Tuesday’s debate, which was a follow-up to another debate in April that López Obrador did not attend, he promised to call churches, academics, the poor, grassroots social organisations and the business sector together in a national alliance to develop a new model for the country, in which the primary objective would be to look after those most in need.

Denise Dresser, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, thought that the PRD candidate embodied the demands of the poorest social sectors in the country, but had not developed or clearly explained the concrete policies he proposed to put into practice to fulfil them.

With respect to Calderón, Dresser said that he has the support of most of the business community and the better-off social classes. She said his proposals were better developed and more feasible.