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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2005 
Calderon Reshapes Mexico Presidential Race
 Will Weissert - Associated Press
| | Felipe Calderon, presidential candidate for the National Action Party (PAN), speaks during an interview in Mexico City, Mexico Thursday, Dec 8, 2005. |
Mexico City - Felipe Calderon was a virtual unknown this summer, his lone claim to fame a feud with President Vicente Fox that prompted him to quit as energy secretary.
But Calderon emerged from a nasty primary fight to secure the presidential nomination of the governing National Action Party. He is now gaining in public opinion polls and reshaping a July 2006 election it once seemed Fox's party could never win.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, the 43-year-old former congressman said he would make up for some of the Fox administration's "insufficiencies" and build an independent campaign without alienating the party's conservative, pro-business base.
"I'm not resentful, nor do I feel offended by him," Calderon said of the president. "There's only respect and a constructive friendship."
Calderon, who holds a Mexican law degree and a master's in public administration from Harvard, pledged to seek consensus with an opposition-dominated Congress that blocked many of Fox's key proposals. But he has also criticized his opponents as part of "an oligarchy that bankrupted Mexico too many times."
"There's a time for throwing fireworks and a time to pick up the pieces," he said, explaining how he would balance his criticism with reconciliation if elected.
Calderon has also hinted that his wife, Margarita Zavala, would not take as active a role in an administration as current first lady Marta Sahagun.
Sahagun flirted with running for president, touching off criticism from some who said that would be tantamount to re-election for Fox. Mexico's constitution limits presidents to one six-year term.
Calderon, who speaks with a hard-edged tone and has already adopted the air of the presidential favorite, said he plans to make free-market policies the cornerstone of his government but that pro-business initiatives are not always the answer.
He called for harsher punishments for criminals and said his government would guarantee universal health care, better education and access for all Mexicans to such basic needs as food and water.
For months, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who stepped down as Mexico City's mayor to run for president with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, had been the clear presidential front-runner.
But polls released in recent weeks have shown his lead shrinking over Calderon and Roberto Madrazo, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party controlled Mexico's presidency for 71 years until losing to Fox in 2000.
Calderon said Thursday his chief competition will be Lopez Obrador, who used handouts for seniors and single mothers as well as major public works projects to earn a reputation as a populist.
But Calderon bristled at the suggestion that such a race would pit the party of the rich against that of the poor, saying Lopez Obrador represented old-style Mexican politics.
"He represents this old model in the name of the poor that left more than half of Mexicans in poverty," Calderon said.
Fox appointed Calderon energy secretary in September 2003, but he quit eight months later after the president criticized him for launching his presidential campaign prematurely.
Though Fox never formally endorsed a candidate for the National Action nomination, he clearly preferred his interior secretary, Santiago Creel. But Calderon, the son of one of National Action's founders, resonated with the party's core supporters.
The candidate said his status as an underdog has helped him gain momentum, while support for his opponents has peaked already.
"The number of people who don't know me will help me keep gaining in the polls," he said. "That's not true for Madrazo or Lopez Obrador, 95 percent of the people already know them." |
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