Mexico City – The contest for Mexico’s presidency has boiled down to a two-horse race between leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon, who is generally judged to have won the campaign’s second and last televised debate.
Several polls gave the advantage to Calderon in Tuesday night’s encounter, which focused mainly on substance but also witnessed some sharp exchanges between the front-runners while dark horses Roberto Campa and Patricia Mercado were left on the sidelines.
The primacy given to issues and proposals may have come as a welcome change to voters enduring a barrage of U.S.-style negative ads that have not been a feature of past campaigns here.
All of the candidates celebrated with supporters after the event, and Calderon did not hesitate to claim victory when he spoke to reporters Wednesday morning.
“We move forward in the perception of the people as the winners of the debate. That will be one more step that brings us closer to the presidency of the republic,” said the standard-bearer of the governing National Action Party, portraying his program as a “centrist option.”
One of his campaign managers, Josefina Vazquez Mota, said Calderon succeeded both in setting out his own agenda and in highlighting his differences with the other four hopefuls, especially Lopez Obrador.
“What we are seeing in general terms is that the triumph goes to Felipe Calderon,” she told EFE.
The former minister in the incumbent National Action government of President Vicente Fox – barred from re-election – said that her party’s candidate is in a “very favorable position” with just over three weeks left before the July 2 balloting to choose a head of state for the 2006-2012 term.
The contest is already defined as one “between the past and the future,” Vazquez Mota said.
Lopez Obrador, she said, is offering a project “resting on the class struggle” that envisions a closed economy reliant on the state as the “principal generator of employment,” while Calderon calls for investment, jobs and an “unqualified respect for legality.”
Vazquez Mota said that National Action will concentrate in the waning days of the campaign on stimulating turnout and strengthening its “message to youth,” notably the 13 million first-time voters who – she maintains – will end up deciding the election.
Meanwhile, Lopez Obrador aide Jesus Ortega told EFE that newspaper polls were unreliable because of what he called the dailies’ bias in favor of Calderon and that post-debate surveys conducted by his candidate’s party showed the two contenders “coming out even or give us the advantage.”
He did agree in describing the race as a two-man affair, opining that Roberto Madrazo, candidate of the formerly dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, “has been left behind” and that “the project of the right, very clearly, is embodied by Felipe Calderon.”
The latest polls have Calderon and Lopez Obrador in a virtual tie, with Madrazo trailing significantly. The two remaining hopefuls register only in the single digits.
Ortega said that Lopez Obrador, who skipped the first debate in April, achieved the objectives he had set for Tuesday night’s exchange.
Besides presenting in a “precise and clear” manner his agenda for tackling poverty and combating inequality, the former Mexico City mayor “looked like a leader” and was careful “not to respond to provocation and turn the debate into a street fight,” Ortega said.
He said that in the final stretch, Lopez Obrador will stress that his program is geared toward “the interest of the majority of the population,” particularly those earning less than 9,000 pesos ($800) a month.
Miffed by talk of a dual between Calderon and Lopez Obrador, Madrazo said Wednesday that it is the PRI which represents a “centrist” option for Mexico.
“They are mistaken in their strategy because it’s not a process of two choices. They both imply the same risk for our country since both are options of the past,” the ex-governor of Tabasco state told EFE.
Calling Calderon a complete neoliberal, the common term in Latin America for an adherent of doctrinaire laissez-faire capitalism, Madrazo suggested that the National Action candidate is implicitly repudiating the more centrist policies of Fox, whose victory in 2000 ended the PRI’s 71-year control of the presidency.
One observer, respected historian Enrique Krauze, summed up the debate as a competition among a “theorist,” Madrazo; an “ideologue,” Lopez Obrador; and a “pragmatist,” Calderon.
