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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | October 2006 
Obrador Faces Fresh Defeat on Home Turf
 Monica Medel - Reuters
| | After his lead evaporated in a race marked by mud-slinging, López Obrador lost by a whisker to conservative Felipe Calderón. |
Villahermosa, Mexico – Mexican leftist leader Andres Manuel López Obrador, with his presidential dream thwarted and his supporters gone quiet, faces another defeat this weekend in an election in his home state of Tabasco.
Opinion polls predict López Obrador's party will lose the Tabasco state governor's race in a new hard-to-swallow blow to the former Indian rights activist, who at the beginning of this year was expected to sweep the July presidential election.
After his lead evaporated in a race marked by mud-slinging, López Obrador lost by a whisker to conservative Felipe Calderón. The raucous protest camps he set up in Mexico City to claim massive election fraud have now disbanded and his protest movement has faded.
The leftist has declared himself president of a parallel government but a defeat for his Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, in the Tabasco governorship could leave a large question mark over his political future, analysts say.
López Obrador won 56 percent support in Tabasco in the July 2 election, far ahead of 38 percent for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which runs the balmy state.
But just three months later, poor ratings for liberal Cesar Ojeda, the candidate he has actively supported on the Tabasco campaign trail, suggest voters were turned off by López Obrador's post-election protests.
“A defeat will weaken him a lot and open opportunities for splits within the PRD. It will start to be recognized inside the PRD that the post-election stance has had an enormous cost,” said Edna Jaime of the Mexican think tank CIDAC.
López Obrador, an anti-poverty crusader still seen as a hero figure by millions of poor Mexicans, brought central Mexico City to a standstill with his anti-fraud protests and alarmed many with strong rhetoric against his rivals.
This week, supporters in Tabasco shouted “Andres President” as he accompanied Ojeda at the end of his campaign for the governorship.
But most polls place Ojeda 10 points behind Andres Granier of the incumbent PRI, whose 71-year rule of Mexico was broken in 2000 by President Vicente Fox, a conservative.
MORE FRAUD PROTESTS?
Granier has lured votes from the left in Tabasco by promising economic help for the elderly, single mothers and the handicapped – the same kind of handouts that made López Obrador popular as Mexico City mayor.
He also has distanced himself from previous PRI governors, who are tainted with a reputation for corruption and cronyism.
López Obrador warned this week he would be on the lookout for vote-rigging in Tabasco and would no more accept it there than he did in the presidential election.
López Obrador himself lost a Tabasco governor's election widely seen as rigged in 1994, and staged mass protests afterward.
“You can't accept vote fraud,” he said in a television interview this week as campaigning ended in Tabasco. “That's complicity, fraud, like what happened on July 2.”
Mexico's top election court said last month it found no evidence of large-scale fraud in July, refused López Obrador's request for a full recount and confirmed Calderón's win.
Granier said he was concerned López Obrador would interfere if his party lost Tabasco state.
“With them, when they win, there's democracy, and when they lose, they are manipulated elections,” he said.
Oil-rich Tabasco is dotted with oil wells and crisscrossed with oil pipelines but little of the wealth has filtered down to the state's 2 million mostly poor inhabitants.
Granier has accused the PRD of intimidating locals into not voting but Ojeda alleges the PRI buys votes with gifts.
(Additional reporting by Adriana Barrera) |
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