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 Editorials | At Issue | June 2006 
Mexico Voters Unimpressed by Opposite Candidates
 S. Lynne Walker - Copley News
| | Andrés Manuel López Obrador (left) and Felipe Calderón are in a dead heat going into Mexico's presidential election July 2, a recent poll shows. |
One presidential candidate is an attorney, a seasoned politician who earned a master's degree in public administration from Harvard. The other is a popular former mayor, a social fighter who walked 500 miles to protest fraud after he lost a governor's race in Tabasco.
Felipe Calderón believes free trade, foreign investment and tourism can create the jobs Mexico needs to become prosperous. Andrés Manuel López Obrador talks about improving Mexico by making life better for the country's 50 million poor.
With 14 days left before the election, voters are still pondering which man – and which ideology – should govern their country.
Six years after Mexico ended the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, by voting Vicente Fox into the presidency, this young democracy finds itself at a crossroads.
The question facing voters when they go to the polls July 2 is whether to continue with Fox's policies, which have strengthened the economy but failed to stem emigration, or whether to distance Mexico from the rest of the world and confront poverty at home with food handouts, scholarships and farm subsidies.
“We are not just talking about different personalities,” said Soledad Loaeza, a professor of political science at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico. “We are talking about two ways of defining the country and two ways of defining presidential authority.”
Across the nation, many Mexicans say they simply cannot find enough good qualities in any one candidate to give him their vote. Some 16 percent of voters – enough to swing the election – are still undecided, according to a poll published Wednesday by the Mexico City newspaper Reforma.
López Obrador, a leftist from the Democratic Revolution Party, is leading Calderón, a conservative from Fox's National Action Party. But López Obrador's two-point lead in that poll is so narrow that the candidates are in a statistical tie. A third candidate, Roberto Madrazo, of the PRI, has been trailing them for months but is close enough that he remains a contender.
“López Obrador doesn't have much experience. And Felipe is as foolish as Fox,” said Judith Flores, a homemaker from the Yucatan capital of Merida, at a Calderón rally here this month. “Madrazo has experience, but he is a liar. So I don't know who to vote for.”
A long, negative campaign marred by personal attacks has confused voters who are not accustomed to this dark side of democracy. The charges have divided the country – and even families – over who should be Mexico's next president. Now, 40 percent of the nation's 71 million registered voters say they may not vote at all.
Walter Trujillo, a chemical engineer from Merida, went to the Calderón rally to listen to the candidate's proposals.
“What I don't like about López Obrador is that he always focuses on the poor,” he said. “But I voted for Fox because I wanted change and I'm not happy. So I don't know if I can support Calderón, either.”
Yucatan campaign stop
Both Calderón and López Obrador brought their campaigns to Yucatan a few days ago, their final stop in this state before the election. Calderón led a massive rally in Merida attended by people bused in by his party, while López Obrador drove from pueblo to pueblo, drawing modest crowds with his whistle stop campaign through rural Mexico.
Calderón is targeting business people and educated, middle-class voters. López Obrador is betting on the poor.
López Obrador's political strategy is risky, analysts say. But with half of Mexico's population living in poverty, López Obrador believes these isolated and often ignored voters will hand him the presidency.
“Help us convince people. We want to govern for everybody,” he said in the tiny town of Maxcanu. “Every man, every woman here, help us convince 10 more people – your family, your co-workers, your friends.”
He promised the crowd food subsidies, cheap electricity and farm credits, drawing on popular programs he put into effect while mayor of Mexico City. He also threatened to renege on a provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement that calls for the removal in 2008 of tariffs on U.S. white corn and beans, two crops with huge symbolic importance in Mexico. And he vowed to slash salaries of top government officials – starting with his own if he is elected – and make the rich pay more taxes.
Because 45 percent of Mexico's wealth is held by 10 percent of the population, López Obrador's platform is resonating with people at the bottom of the economic ladder.
His opponents accuse him of trying to turn Mexico's poor into welfare recipients.
“He is trying to confront poverty by giving out money. It is a very old-fashioned vision, in the style of the '70s in Mexico,” the PRI candidate, Madrazo, said in an interview. “You have to pull people out of poverty with jobs, with education and health care.”
López Obrador's approach seems to be working in the countryside. While he doesn't bring as much charisma to the campaign as Fox did six years ago, he clearly touches ordinary Mexicans in a way that Calderón can't.
“We love his character. He is humble like us. He knows our needs here,” said María Ek, who was so surprised that a presidential candidate would come to her town of Motul that she rode her bike to the plaza to see López Obrador for herself. “We are going to give him our vote and then we are going to see that he keeps his promise to us.”
A 52-year-old widower with three grown sons, López Obrador reminds people of his humble beginnings as the son of shopkeepers from a Tabasco farm town where even electricity was scarce. He speaks slowly and sprinkles his message with the words of ordinary people, portraying himself as the savior of Mexico's downtrodden and poor.
Calderón, a balding and bespectacled 43-year-old father of three young children, tries to cast himself as an average guy, dancing with female supporters and kicking soccer balls into the crowd. But he looks stiff at campaign rallies and has turned off voters by calling López Obrador a liar and blaming him for the rising debt, unemployment, crime and corruption that racked Mexico City when he was mayor.
“You are deciding between two very different visions,” Calderón told a crowd of several thousand in Campeche. “People tell me, 'Felipe, we don't want handouts. We want dignified work.' I am going to be the president of jobs. I want to open doors so people can work.”
Calderón vows to run Mexico with a “firm hand,” prompting accusations from his opponents that he would be an intolerant and repressive president. But political analysts say it is López Obrador who is more likely to assert presidential authority.
“López Obrador does not know how to negotiate. He does not know how to work with a team,” said political analyst Primitivo Rodríguez. “He doesn't listen to anyone. If López Obrador were president, he would not call a Cabinet meeting to get advice. He would call the meeting to tell his Cabinet what to do.”
Trading accusations
Calderón has accused López Obrador of being like Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, a stridently anti-American leftist whose policies have sparked violent confrontations and massive strikes. In campaign spots, Calderón has called López Obrador a “danger to Mexico.”
López Obrador has responded by alleging that Calderón's brother-in-law won more than $200 million in government contracts during Calderón's nine-month tenure as energy minister in Fox's Cabinet.
Calderón also accuses López Obrador of being anti-business and a threat to Mexico's economic security.
“He hates businessmen. He never loses an opportunity to insult them,” Calderón said at the rally in Campeche. “Every one of those businessmen represent thousands and thousands of jobs for Mexicans.”
Because López Obrador has failed to ease concerns in the business community, the real danger lies in the reaction of the financial markets if he wins the election, said political analyst Federico Estévez.
“He didn't use the early months of the campaign to hug the center and establish clear commitments that needed to be heard by the business community,” Estévez said.
López Obrador will claim the reaction comes from “die-hard reactionaries on the right who can't abide popular change,” Estévez said. “But the fact is that he isn't very good on the big, modern vision.”
Ironically, many analysts say López Obrador's rhetoric mimics the PRI, a party that is now his archrival. Once a staunch member of the PRI, even serving as the party's state president in Tabasco, López Obrador broke from the party in 1988, after he clashed with the party's gubernatorial candidate in Tabasco.
“The things he is saying are the same things that we heard from the PRI, but the PRI that existed 40 years ago,” said Loaeza, the political science professor. “The left is prepared to support an economic and political platform that produced the inequality that we are living today. They are presenting it like paradise lost. It is incomprehensible.”
López Obrador's biggest selling point may be that he represents a dramatic political shift in a country that is deeply disappointed with Fox for not delivering on many of his campaign promises.
Calderón is the candidate of continuity, which in the minds of many Mexicans is a strike against him.
He tells voters that he wants “to open the door so people can get out of misery and poverty.” But for millions of Mexicans still desperate for change, such promises sound timeworn and hollow.
“We have asked the government to help us plant corn, but we haven't gotten anything. We are dangling in the wind,” said Arsenio Komul, who gave up farming and now charges for rides in his bicycle taxi in the town of Maxcanu. “For me, Calderón is a man who is full of lies. López Obrador is our best option.”
S. Lynne Walker: slwalker@prodigy.net.mx |
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