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 Editorials | At Issue | April 2005 
If Lopez Obrador Were to Become President
 Kenneth Emmond - The Herald Mexico
| | Mexico City's leftist mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, compared his plight to that of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. |
What might happen if the worst fears of President Vicente Fox, Santiago Creel, Roberto Madrazo, and other members of the Political Class were realized, and Mexico City's mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the man who consistently leads the nation's opinion polls, were to be elected president of Mexico?
The short answer is, no one knows. Still, there are plenty of apocalyptic doomsayers willing to share their thoughts.
Last week Claudio X. González, a high-profile leader of the Mexican business community, said, "All indications are that the person who will compete (in the 2006 presidential elections) is a political leftist that is retrograde and dinosaur-like, and will leave Mexico in bankruptcy."
González also worries about polarization of the nation, the possible compromising of the Rule of Law, and the danger of a flight of capital.
The specter of a López Obrador presidency also strikes fear in the hearts of Mexico's bankers. At least one bank, eyeing the debt Mexico City has accumulated under his watch as mayor, predicts that a López Obrador government will usher in an era of 20 percent inflation.
Some political scientists even aver that López Obrador is "not a leftist," that he is a populist opportunist, whose big chance in politics happened to develop in the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
One critic, José Fernández Santillán, director of the Center of Research in Humanities of the Monterrey Technical Institute, says Mexico City's executive branch operates like the "old PRI" - apparently a snide reference to René Bejarano, Carlos Ahumada and the videoscandals.
As we should know by now, it's always dangerous to predict how a candidate will act once he is elected.
The U.S. administration is aware of that: Condoleezza Rice is on the record as saying that the Americans would be able to work with a leftist Mexican government.
A classic example of post-electoral surprise is very close to home: who would have guessed that George W. Bush, elected in 2000 on a platform that included rhetoric about international co-operation, would turn into the unilateralist's unilateralist?
Or that President Ernesto Zedillo, chosen in 1994 by his predecessor, Carlos Salinas, as guardian of the status quo, would be a catalyst for democracy and fair elections in Mexico?
And then there's Brazil's president, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, or "Lula."
As a candidate in 2002, he was even scarier than López Obrador because, unlike the mayor, he is embraced as a man of the people because of his humble beginnings. As a self-educated metal worker and unionist in an earlier life and leader of the Workers' Party, no one could doubt his leftist credentials.
Before Lula's election there was much hand-wringing from the business community and the political elite, with bleak predictions of what would happen to the Brazilian economy should he actually be elected.
Yet under Lula's leadership, Brazil's economy grew by 5.2 percent last year.
He managed the nation's debt so successfully that just last week he turned down an offer of further standby credit from the International Monetary Fund.
Mexico's next president, whoever it is and whatever campaign rhetoric he uses, will face the same set of problems: widespread poverty, a crying need for more government services, competition from abroad for export markets and foreign investment, and an ever-more-urgent need for an array of institutional reforms.
And, in all likelihood, he will have to cajole the required legislation through a Congress in which no single party has a majority.
Another likely outcome of a López Obrador presidency is the disillusionment of leftist supporters over time as juggled priorities and congressional hurdles mean that electoral promises remain unfulfilled. That's what happened to Lula, who lost his party majority in last February's mid-term Congressional elections.
If past performance is any guide, President López Obrador would be a man who relishes a fight, who would garner support for measures unpopular with Congress by taking his case straight to the people through the news media, public demonstrations, and maybe even referenda.
Returning to the present, the Fox government has painted itself into a corner. If it fails in its strategy to bar López Obrador from running by employing a frivolous technicality over a trivial offense, it will have generated more publicity for him than he could have dreamed possible not to mention a sympathy vote for the opinion poll leader.
If it succeeds, the likely result will be more political instability, uncertainty, and disillusionment among voters than would occur in any of the scenarios advanced by the mayor's detractors. It will infuriate voters if the man they want to support is disqualified by legal maneuvering, and they discover that the "rule of law" that Creel keeps talking about turns out to be merely the "rule of selectively applied technicalities within the law."
That anger could precipitate precisely what Claudio X. Gonzalez fears most: polarization of the nation, the possible compromising of the Rule of Law, and the danger of a flight of capital.
And that would be the saddest, most ironic twist of all.
Kenneth Emmond is a freelance journalist and economist who has lived in Mexico since 1995. Kemmond00@yahoo.com |
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