 |
|
|
 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Underdog Calderon Beats Odds for Mexican Presidency
 Lorraine Orlandi - Reuters
| | Presidential candidate Felipe Calderon from the National Action Party (PAN) talks to the media after casting his ballot during the presidential election in Mexico City July 2, 2006. (Jorge Silva/Reuters |
As a bookish Catholic schoolboy, Felipe Calderon was ridiculed by classmates for his family's quixotic fight against Mexico's autocratic rule. Even if you win, he was taunted, you can never take power.
Calderon, now 43, is on the verge of becoming president after apparently winning a razor-thin victory in Sunday's election.
Preliminary results show Calderon won by one percentage point, or 400,000 votes, although leftist rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he will challenge the result.
If Calderon's victory is ratified, it would be an upset in the first presidential race since his conservative party ended seven decades of single-party rule six years ago.
It would also buck a leftist trend in Latin America.
Calderon, a lawyer and economist with a Harvard degree, pleases Washington and Wall Street with plans to follow President Vicente Fox's free market policies to promote job growth and economic stability.
Labeled by opponents the candidate of the rich and seen by many as a bloodless technocrat, Calderon was a long shot to beat Lopez Obrador, a feisty leftist who promised to shake up government and economic policy in favor of the poor.
Even fans acknowledge Calderon lacks the charisma of Lopez Obrador or Fox. But they say his rivals underestimated a determination that borders on intransigence.
"At home I learned to never accept as given a situation that seemed unacceptable," Calderon said just before the vote.
When his campaign was floundering, Calderon launched a media attack likening Lopez Obrador to firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Although opponents charged him with using his ample war chest to fund a fear-mongering campaign, the conservative's strategy clearly hit home.
"Calderon will protect my job, my income. With Lopez Obrador there would be more confrontation, more conflict with business, and the country could fall into crisis again," Jose Paredes, 28, a supermarket checkout clerk, said after voting on Sunday.
"DISOBEDIENT SON"
Calderon, a father of three young children, fell out with Fox in 2004 over his own presidential ambitions and quit as energy minister. He surprised even his backers by defeating Fox protege Santiago Creel in his National Action Party's primary.
For his campaign, Calderon took the moniker "disobedient son" from a ballad his mother used to sing, highlighting his differences with Fox and long struggle in the opposition.
A Calderon presidency would fulfill a dream that began with his late father, a teacher and perennial candidate from the central city of Morelia who helped found the upstart National Action Party, or PAN.
The youngest of five children in a Catholic family of modest means, Calderon helped distribute leaflets and paint placards in one failed campaign after another against the corrupt, long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
"I once asked my father ... why do you keep doing this?" he recalled recently. "He taught me that we do it out of duty ... for the common good. If we don't do it, no one will."
Calderon became PAN president, ran unsuccessfully for Michoacan governor and went to Congress as head of the minority PAN bloc. Even political opponents recognize his political savvy, but detractors fear he will carry on a lackluster Fox legacy of catering to the elite and kowtowing to Washington.
"It is the same neo-liberal model," said Armando Hurtado, a leader of Lopez Obrador's party in Michoacan state. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us