Felipe Calderon has, presumably, been elected Mexico’s new president:
MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) — The ruling party’s Felipe Calderon won the official count in Mexico’s disputed presidential race by just under 0.6 percent Thursday, the culmination of a come-from-behind campaign for a recently obscure technocrat.
But his leftist rival earlier declared victory and said he’d fight the election in court.
Calderon was already reaching out to other parties to build a “unity government,” while his rival, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, blamed fraud for his narrow loss in the vote count and called on his supporters to fill Mexico City’s main square Saturday in a show of force.
With the 41 million votes counted, Calderon of President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party had 35.88 percent, or 14,981,268 votes, to 14,745,262, or 35.31 percent, for Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party. The two were separated by 0.57 percent, or 236,006 votes.
Matthew Shugart of Fruits & Votes, who has a detailed fact-rich analysis of the results, predicts that López Obrador (frequently referred to as “AMLOâ€) will challenge the vote, alleging fraud, and that’s about as far as it will go:
I am not in the business of making predictions, but I suspect that AMLO “has†to do this–given his and his party’s history and the closeness of an election that he had been expected to win until polls tightened this spring–but that he has a weak case legally and little stomach for a major fight in the streets. Public opinion is likely to turn against him and the party if they press the matter too far, much as public opinion turned decisively towards him when the Fox Administration (through Fox’s originally expected successor as PAN candidate, then-Minister of the Interior Santiago Creel) and the PRI tried to have him barred from running over an alleged incident of corruption in AMLO’s administration of Mexico City.
It seems to me that, if this election demonstrates anything, it’s that the PAN has not assumed the same sort of dominance that the PRI held for so long. Mexico really is more democratic.
The Mex Files points to several reports from what appear to be reliable sources of election fraud in the form of dumping ballot boxes in PRD strongholds. This will almost certainly fuel the challenges.
Mark in Mexico has multiple posts on the most recent results of the election. Just keep scrolling. In this post he quotes some recent statements from AMLO that seem certain to add fuel to the fire.
Will the outcome of the election be decided in the streets? So far, so good, but stay tuned.
Here is the thing: 30% of Mexicans voted for neither Calderon nor Obrador. Who do they want to rule them, of the two parties? I would wager most of the 30% prefer the way things are. These are the elite and those who profit from good relationships with the elite.
This is Latin American power politics. Mexico is richer than most nations in the world, and certainly richer than most latin countries. It has a larger middle class, which is resistant to radical change. Its elite class would rather have PRI back, but at least PAN keeps the radicals away.
Obrador got as many votes as he could muster, and then some. The only thing Obrador can offer to the middle class and the elite in Mexico is total destruction, a la Cuba, or a la Venezuela in progress. To the mestizos in poverty he promises the world like all radicals, but he lies.