Mexico City – Conservative candidate for the Mexican presidency Felipe Calderon holds a 3-point lead over his nearest rival, the leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, according to a new poll out Monday.
The survey published by the daily El Universal gives Calderon of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) 37 percent of voter preference and Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) 34 percent.
Coming in a distant third is the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Roberto Madrazo with 22 percent.
The newspaper’s analysis of the poll, taken between June 7-9 in the days immediately following the candidates’ last televised debate before the July 2 elections, attributes support for Calderon to the fact that, in its opinion, he won the televised encounter.
After the June 6 debate, most of the media thought that Calderon performed best of all the candidates, an opinion not shared by the Lopez Obrador team.
A statistical study in El Universal before the debate showed the PAN and PRD candidates tied at 36 percent each, while Madrazo trailed with 24 percent.
Meanwhile, the financial daily El Economista, in an article signed by its director Luis Enrique Mercado, reported Monday that Lopez Obrador is using “dirty money” to finance his campaign.
The newspaper said Monday that it has documents which show that since 2003 Lopez Obrador and his team “created and applied a strategy to extort money from ‘black spots'(unlicensed nightclubs), street vendors, police, minibus drivers and taxi drivers, plus entrepreneurs who do business with the Mexico City municipal government.
According to the conservative, business-oriented publication, the plan was designed to collect more funds for the leftist candidate’s presidential campaign than the electoral authority allows, and to do so without raising suspicions.
At the same time El Economista said that the PRD candidate “inflated” the budgets of public works.
One of the documents in the newspaper’s possession is signed with the initials CSP, which the daily attributes to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the present coordinator of Lopez Obrador’s presidential campaign. EFE
