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

Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón, a moderate conservative and devout Roman Catholic, has promised to govern with the opposition parties and has even adopted some of the left’s cherished causes. But some of his allies, powerful business sectors and rightwing radicals, are pulling in the opposite direction.

Calderón, of the governing National Action Party (PAN), will succeed President Vicente Fox on Dec. 1. While the president-elect is calling for dialogue and meeting with opposition leaders, declaring that he intends to prioritise the struggle against poverty, the PAN leader, Manuel Espino, continues to revile the left in bellicose terms.

Espino belongs to the far-right wing of the PAN, and his relationship with Calderón is so tense that they are no longer on speaking terms.

Calderón and his team have “an enemy within (Espino),” and therefore a crisis is bound to break out soon, Ricardo Alemán, political columnist for the local daily El Universal, told IPS.

The PAN was founded by Roman Catholics in 1939, and is classified as conservative by political analysts, although some of its members describe themselves as centrist. The future president belongs to this centrist group, and was not supported by Espino nor by Fox in the party’s primary elections.

Furthermore, Calderón won the Jul. 2 elections by only half a percentage point over his leftwing opponent, Andrés López Obrador, who maintains that the election was fraudulent. However, López Obrador and his Coalition for the Good of All failed to make their charges stick in the electoral court.

According to López Obrador, Calderón, like Fox, represents the worst kind of economic and social conservatism.

Analysts tend to tone down these judgments about Calderón, a 44-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer who has been the leader of his party, and has served as a legislator and government minister. They place him to the left of many of his fellow PAN members, with whom he has sometimes had strong differences of opinion.

Accusing Fox and Calderón of representing the far right and of being responsible for a presumptive “crisis” in Mexico was a mistake on the part of the left, because they do not, and nor is there a disaster situation in the country, according to anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra, researcher emeritus at the Institute of Social Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The only effect of the left’s strategy to undermine the “modern right,” represented by Calderón and to a certain extent by Fox, was to alienate moderate voters, he said.

Fox, whose six-year term of office is up in December, developed education and health policies which drew criticism even from conservative sectors, who felt they contradicted pro-life values by promoting sex education and making the “morning after pill” or emergency contraception available to women without cost, say experts.

Furthermore, Fox’s anti-poverty programmes have been praised by the United Nations, and were used as models for similar initiatives implemented by leftwing or centre-left governments in countries such as Brazil and Chile.

However, during the Fox administration there was no reduction in social inequality, while the business community enjoyed a boom period. President Fox, a former Coca Cola executive, actually defined his government as being “of businessmen, for businessmen and by businessmen.”

The top 10 businesspeople in Mexico made combined profits of 21 billion dollars in 2005, a figure 70 percent higher than the entire budget of the ministry of Education that year. Meanwhile, poverty continues to affect more than half of Mexico’s 103 million people to varying degrees.

In his campaign, Calderón advocated keeping the country on the free market track, and encouraging investment and employment. Now, as president-elect, he is standing by these plans, but adds that he will emphasise the struggle against poverty, and says that he will listen to the left’s proposals in that area.

He is also holding meetings with opposition politicians, and his aides are trying to set up a meeting with López Obrador, the head of the Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the largest party in the For the Good of All coalition.

Calderón has asked the Federal Electoral Institute not to burn the ballots from the July election, as the law stipulates. The PRD has made the same request, hoping for a future recount of all of the ballots, although it would not be legally valid.

López Obrador, who after the tribunal confirmed the result against him said he would form a “parallel” government, predicted that Calderón would hand out ministries and adopt public policies as rewards for the “shady” bargains he had allegedly struck with the business world and the right.

A source in the Business Coordinating Council told IPS that the Council has already presented the president-elect with a list of people it would like to see at the head of various ministries.

The Council brings together the most powerful members of the business community, and backed Calderón in the presidential election campaign. According to the leftwing weekly Proceso, “el Yunque” (The Anvil), a secret ultra-rightwing organisation, is active in the Council.

The Council paid for advertisements in June that criticised López Obrador’s platform, and urged voters to choose economic continuity. The electoral authorities determined that the ads were illegal and ordered that they be yanked.

Several members of the Council had individually supported López Obrador in the past, especially when he was mayor of Mexico City from 2001 to 2005, and was the front-runner for the presidency. However, they eventually distanced themselves from him during the presidential campaign.

The business lobby is now demanding that Fox and, later, Calderón crack down hard on protest actions by the left, such as the occupation of a central avenue and a plaza in the capital since late July, in order to protect investment and ensure social harmony.

The breach between the business community and López Obrador has grown in proportion to his accusations that people in this sector are corrupt and over-privileged.

Carlos Slim, who between 2001 and 2005 rose from 25th to 3rd place on the U.S. magazine Forbes’ annual list of the world’s richest people, was one of the businessmen closest to López Obrador when he was mayor of the capital.

Slim took over a large part of a municipal government initiative to restore Mexico City’s historic centre, making major real estate investments.

But he soon relinquished his links with the left and rapidly contacted Calderón, who he has already met with a couple of times in the last two weeks.

Slim, the owner of an empire which includes telecommunications, banking, shops, restaurants, and tobacco companies, and who has millions invested in the media in Mexico and other countries, is now lobbying the government to authorise his firm Teléfonos de México to offer television services restricted to subscribers.

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