The presidential elections in Mexico are over and we don’t know yet who won:
MEXICO CITY – Two bitter rivals declared themselves winners of Mexico’s extraordinarily close presidential race, even though official results wouldn’t be ready for days, sparking cries of fraud from supporters and fears of violence.
The two candidates were separated by fewer than 401,000 votes, with more than 36 million counted in a preliminary tally by electoral officials. The conservative, Felipe Calderon had 36.6 percent to leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s 35.5 percent, according to results from 91.4 percent of polling places.
But the Federal Electoral Institute stressed those results weren’t final — and said it wouldn’t declare a victor until an official count due to start Wednesday.
In the meantime, both candidates declared victory, raising questions about their pledges to respect an electoral process in which Mexicans invested hundreds of millions of dollars to overcome decades of systematic fraud.
“We have no doubt that we have won the presidential election,” Calderon told supporters.
“Smile: We’ve already won,” Lopez Obrador told his. “We’re going to defend our triumph. We aren’t going to let them try to make our results disappear.”
I’m just glad that the news media and bloggers here are taking some notice of the election. I wish they’d seen fit to give us a little more info a little earlier so we’d have some idea of what’s going on and what the implications are.
I don’t understand the system there any registered voter can vote in any polling place in Mexico so long as he or she has the proper voter’s identification. In all likelihood that means that, in a close election like this one in which the two leading candidates, Felipe Calderón and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are separated by less than three percentage point, tabulating errors and fraud will be enough to throw the election one way or another. Maybe I’m just judging by Chicago. If we had such a system here, not only would the dead be voting, they’d be voting in every polling place in the city.
Roberto Madrazo, the PRI candidate, is apparently running a distant third but is still polling nearly 20% of the vote. IIRC that’s higher than any third party has polled in the United States in a century.
Again, my understanding is shaky but as I understand it López Obrador’s party, the PRD, is a left party (some have compared him to Chavez in Venezuela), Calderón’s party, the PAN is center-right, and Madrazo’s party, the PRI, is center-left, and all of the parties are polling well enough to hold significant numbers of seats in the legislature, the likelihood is that Mexico will revert back to its typically center-left orientation.
A.M. Mora y Leon of Publius Pundit is providing excellent live coverage from Tijuana:
What was striking to me was that despite discontent with the PAN party under Fox, the support for PAN seemed to be rock solid and the people’s faith unshaken. Many cited their faith in free trade and desire to remain friends with the U.S. I found that moving.
There was one other factor that stood out for me – people said the number one issue was personal security, and they believed Felipe Calderon was the man who would be most likely to do something about it. I took a photo of a Calderon campaign poster. It was posted on a house that was literally a cage, it was so covered with security bars. Those two factors seemed to fit together.
As prosperity rises in Mexico’s north, Mexicans seemed to be more concerned about personal security than has generally been reported in the press. Jobs and education have been the dominant themes, but security was what people mentioned to me.
Ex-pat Mark in Mexico, posting from Oaxaca, was liveblogging the election results yesterday. I expect he’ll be posting again today.
Richard Grabman of The Mex Files, an ex-pat posting from Mexico City, is providing additional analysis:
PRD probably will work with PRI (despite long protestations that the two will never work together, in practical terms, they’d have no choice) — bringing back Mexico to it’s traditionally left-of-center orientation… even if Calderón is President, since he’s announced he will (and in this close of an election, would have no other choice, given that his legitimacy will otherwise be challenged) form a coalition cabinet including the left.
