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 Editorials | March 2005 
The Explosive Mix in Mexico's Politics
 James C. Mckinley Jr. - NY Times
For months the political debate in Mexico has been dominated by an escalating war between the populist mayor of this giant capital city and President Vicente Fox.
| A legal battle could bar Manuel López Obrador, Mexico City's enormously popular mayor, from seeking the presidency. (Photo: Marco Ugarte/Associated Press)
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On the surface, the fight seemed to be an endless shouting match about the rule of law and the meaning of democracy until both sides called a temporary cease-fire to the mudslinging last week.
The president and his aides repeatedly charged the mayor with putting himself above the law, while the mayor accused the Fox administration of using a trumped-up charge of contempt of court to knock him off the presidential ballot in 2006.
Underlying the dispute, however, is something much more explosive: an abiding fear among business leaders and conservatives of Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a messianic leftist who has become the most popular politician in the Democratic Revolutionary Party and a man whom they suspect of harboring a secret agenda of rolling back 10 years of economic liberalization and introducing lavish social programs the government cannot afford.
The paradox, some political analysts are saying, is that in their determination to preserve the economic changes, the conservatives may be undermining something even more precious: Mexico's fragile democracy.
Conservatives, among them Mr. Fox himself, appear to think that Mr. López, if elected, may take up the mantle of Hugo Chávez, the leftist president who has roiled politics in Venezuela. And they are willing to support nearly any measure that would keep him from winning, even if it means banning him from the ballot with a relatively minor conviction for ignoring a court order.
"Fox sees López Obrador and he thinks populist, he thinks Chávez, he thinks devaluation, the end of the economic liberalization model he has tried to keep afloat," said Denise Dresser, professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. "I think he's reacting very much with his gut."
For his part, Mr. López has dismissed the comparison to President Chávez as a gross simplification meant to scare voters. "Every people has its own history, leaders; they are distinct realities; there are no twins," he said last month. "I am the product of very special circumstances, so I have nothing to do with Chávez."
Still, Mr. López has put forward an ambitious plan aimed at the working class that flies in the face of the current government's mission to nurture private business. For instance, he rejects any plans to privatize Mexico's oil and energy industries. He has promised national food subsidies for people over 65 and free medicine and medical care for every citizen. He also wants to investigate a fund set up in 1998 to bail out banks.
"When you talk about populism, you have to be careful," he said to a reporter recently. "One talks about it when there are programs to help poor people, but rescue the bankers and we call it development."
Santiago Creel, the current secretary of government who is seen as the most likely candidate for president from Mr. Fox's conservative National Action Party, known as PAN, made it plain in a recent interview he thought a López presidency would be an economic disaster.
"What is clear is that he has rejected all the economic reforms that we have put forward, all of them," Mr. Creel said. "And it's clear that his government has raised the level of public debt in a very important way and has also raised the levels of subsidies, making a pretty artificial economy."
Whether the conservatives' fears about the economy are well founded or not, Mr. López, who is enormously popular, does have a history of challenging entrenched interests. After he lost the fraud-ridden 1994 election for governor of Tabasco, his native state, he and his supporters took their grievances to the streets, taking over oil wells, holding sit-ins and blocking highways.
Similar unrest in 2006 would taint Mr. Fox's claim to have constructed a true democracy, and Mr. López, with characteristic pugnacity, has already vowed to run a martyr's campaign from behind bars if the court case against him goes forward.
Besides provoking ugly street protests, political analysts fret that the move to nip Mr. López's candidacy in the bud with a legal move would most likely cause widespread disillusionment with the elections. More than 50 of the nation's most respected intellectuals signed a public letter urging the Congress to drop the effort and let Mr. López be judged at the ballot box rather than in court.
To many Mexicans, the crime that Mr. López is charged with does seem trivial by past standards. The prosecutors in Mr. Fox's Justice Department say officials in the mayor's administration ignored a judge's order to halt the construction of a road to a private hospital. Whether the mayor knew of the order is not known. Still, a conviction would disqualify him from the presidential race under Mexican law.
The president and his aides have cast their fight against the mayor as one to preserve the rule of law, which they see as one of Mr. Fox's few accomplishments. Speaking about the mayor, the president said the country must consolidate the culture of complying with the law and added, "There cannot be, nor must there be, exceptions."
Mayor López has made fun of these pronouncements, saying President Fox is no better than past party bosses and even dictators. "It's gotten into the citizen president's head that I shouldn't be on the 2006 electoral ballot, and they are trying to push me aside," he said.
Some political analysts even see a new, antileft alliance forming between Mr. Fox's party and the old governing party he defeated in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, an idea leaders of both parties deny. The theory is that the conservatives would rather see the PRI back in the president's mansion and themselves in the role of loyal opposition than see their economic reforms shredded.
Other political analysts say the fears among conservatives of a López presidency are overblown. Congress is not likely to change much, they argue, and no party will have a majority. So Mr. López will have the same trouble passing his agenda that Mr. Fox has had.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the president and the leaders of the PRI will opt to let the voters decide whether a leftist should get a chance to head the state.
"For the first time a leftist could possibly become president," Ms. Dresser said. "It's immensely threatening to them." |
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