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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2006 
Presidential Hopeful Up in Polls
 Will Weissert - Associated Press
| | National Action Party presidential candidate Felipe Calderon waves during a rally in Delicias Friday, Feb. 24 2006, on the northern State of Chihuahua, Mexico. Calderon is running with the pro-business National Action Party, which President Vicente Fox took to the presidency in 2000. But whether he can make a personal connection with everyday Mexicans mustering the kind of contagious charisma that was Fox's specialty remains to be seen. (AP/Guillermo Arias) |
Chihuahua, Mexico - Presidential candidate Felipe Calderon was barely off the jetway when a mariachi band filled this desert city's tiny airport with trumpet-blaring ballads and dozens of political supporters converged on the scene.
"Felipe! Felipe!" they cried.
Gaining momentum in the latest polls, Calderon represents the pro-business National Action Party, which President Vicente Fox took to victory in 2000. But whether he can connect with a majority of everyday Mexicans - and muster the contagious charisma that was Fox's specialty - remains to be seen.
Calderon says he's a candidate who can celebrate the current administration's successes, while making up for its mistakes.
He says he's no Fox, and that's OK.
"The circumstances in which Mexico is living have changed," Calderon said after a rally in the small town of Hidalgo del Parral. "I see an electorate that is much more critical, more rational."
Tall and ruggedly handsome, Fox was the outsider in cowboy boots who thrived in Mexico's heartland when he knocked the Institutional Revolutionary Party from power for the first time since it was founded in 1929. He is barred by the constitution from seeking a second term, and Calderon wasn't his preferred successor.
"Vicente was the sort of comic book hero, the guy who was going to bring down the regime," said Arturo Sarukhan, who was consul general in New York under Fox before joining the Calderon campaign. "There was a certain mythical aura."
Shorter and balder, Calderon does not cut as romantic a figure. At 43, he is two decades younger than Fox, slower with a smile, and sometimes appears ill-at-ease in the spotlight.
Calderon's campaign aides say his no-frills appearance is an advantage. "People see him ... and they say, 'This guy's like me,'" Sarukhan said.
But the idea of Calderon as a champion of the common man might be a tough sell. He's a lawyer with a graduate degree from Harvard who has dedicated years to his party, serving as its general director and as a congressman before briefly becoming Fox's energy secretary.
He is more conservative than the president, citing Scripture in stump speeches and trumpeting National Action's anti-abortion party line - positions that proved critical in winning a three-way race for the party nomination.
Calderon says he has more charm than many give him credit for - that he likes to "climb aboard bicycles, tractors, trailers, airplanes and whatever else to be near the people, do what the people do and have some fun."
Many of the president's top reforms have stalled in Congress, blocked by the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Democratic Revolutionary Party, which is led by front-running presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Calderon pledges to be more open to negotiation so his pet projects will pass. He's also promised to continue Fox's aggressive housing and micro-credit programs while maintaining the fiscal restraint that kept the peso strong and Mexico out of unwieldy foreign debt.
He also plans to have a more critical distance from Washington. Fox started out a close friend to President Bush, but their relationship suffered after Mexico refused to support the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Calderon doesn't claim to be close to Bush, and unlike Fox has openly condemned the war as a mistake.
He is unlikely to push for a bilateral immigration agreement that would grant legal status to the millions of undocumented Mexicans in the United States - something the Fox administration mentions almost weekly but has been unable to deliver.
"That you had a Mexican president willing to stake and invest political capital in the relationship with the United States and that he has nothing to show for it puts everyone in a very tight spot in Mexico," Sarukhan said.
Calderon also has shied away from making the kind of sweeping promises about economic growth and job creation that Fox made on the campaign trail. Those pledges came back to deeply embarrass the president after the Sept. 11 attacks slowed much of the world's economy.
In a few months, Calderon has leapfrogged Roberto Madrazo, the Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate, in the polls and is within striking distance of Lopez Obrador, who is known for folksy manners and fiery speeches.
"Fox started the process of change, but he didn't finish it," said Roberto Montes, the 48-year-old owner of an auto mechanic business who was at Calderon's Parral rally. "Felipe offers more action than promises." |
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