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 Editorials | Opinions | June 2005 
Mexico's Leftist Candidate Will Campaign As Super-Moderate
 Andres Oppenheimer
Mexico City's fiery leftist mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the front-runner in the race for Mexico's 2006 presidential elections, is likely to surprise many in coming months: He will seek to portray himself as a super-moderate leftist, a la Chilean President Ricardo Lagos.
Will that be a sincere representation of the Mexican presidential hopeful's thinking? Or a political ploy to dispel fears that he would be a radical, anti-American leader, like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez?
This is what I am hearing from top aides to López Obrador:
In coming months, he will start a four-country tour aimed at fending off campaign accusations that he has no international experience and that he would turn Mexico into another Venezuela. His tour, scheduled for October, will start in Chile, as a clear sign to the world that he wants to be associated with President Lagos, whose country has been Latin America's most successful in combating poverty.
''Yes, it's meant to send a signal,'' former Foreign Secretary Manuel Camacho Solis, a top aide to López Obrador, told me in an interview this week. ``Chile is the best-managed country in Latin America, and one that has a successful socialist government.''
From Chile, López Obrador plans to go to Brazil, another country with a leftist government that - while not as pro-globalization as Chile's - has turned out to be much more responsible on economic affairs than many in the business world had predicted.
''Brazil was chosen because of its weight in Latin America, and because the left has shown that it can win and that it can govern,'' Camacho Solis said.
López Obrador then plans to visit Spain, ruled by Socialist President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He will end his tour in the United States, visiting New York and Washington. If he does not get an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he will meet with top foreign policy establishment figures, aides to the Mexican hopeful say.
López Obrador's campaign strategy is based on the widespread belief that he can't win the presidency without expanding his leftist base and winning over more moderate, centrist voters. According to a poll by the daily Reforma this week, if the election were held today, López Obrador would win with 36 percent of the vote, followed by Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential hopeful Roberto Madrazo with 23 percent and government-backed Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, who announced Wednesday he was resigning to campaign for the nomination of the ruling National Action Party, with 21 percent. Another poll, by the daily Milenio, has López Obrador leading by only seven points.
Either way, López Obrador's current lead could erode in coming months. He is likely to be the target of a ''fear campaign'' by his two rivals, who will probably portray him as a dangerous threat to Mexico's stability. That's a charge that cannot be taken lightly: Mexico is a country obsessed with its own history, and the collective memory of the bloody 1910-17 Mexican Revolution and its estimated 1 million dead is fresh in most Mexicans' minds.
One likely scenario: López Obrador's rivals will run negative ads claming that if the left wins, the U.S. Congress will block family remittances to Mexico under the pretext that Washington should not help subsidize the economy of a country allegedly close to Cuba and Venezuela. More than 30 million Mexicans receive an estimated $16 billion a year from their relatives in the United States.
My conclusion: From what I heard from López Obrador when I interviewed him a few months ago, and from what Camacho Solis told me this week, it's clear that López Obrador will campaign as a Lagos-like moderate.
But then, so did Chávez when he first campaigned for president in 1998. López Obrador may undergo a political transformation in coming months, similar to that of Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula was an old-guard leftist who campaigned as a moderate to win centrist votes, and discovered along the way that much of what his campaign strategists were feeding him actually made sense. If elected, López Obrador may not become a Lagos, but - with luck - he could become a Lula. |
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