Mexico City – Mexico’s presidential hopefuls are reaching out to women ahead of a tight election, appearing on television shows aimed at housewives to tell how they wooed their wives or show off their skills with a barbecue grill.
All three leading candidates have appealed to female voters while crisscrossing the country in the campaign’s final frantic push ahead of the July 2 vote.
“Like a lot of Mexicans, I was educated in a way that was, honestly, macho: that women are second-class citizens,” conservative candidate Felipe Calderon said recently on the popular daytime program “Hoy.” “That’s not right. Women and men are equals.”
That’s a relatively new idea in Mexico, where women weren’t allowed to vote – or even be defined by the constitution as citizens – until 1953. They have since made impressive strides.
By law, women must now make up 30 percent of each party’s congressional candidates, and some of the country’s most prominent politicians are female, including Zacatecas Gov. Amalia Garcia and Beatriz Paredes, a former governor and federal lawmaker who is now running for Mexico City mayor.
Calderon’s strong religious faith and defense of traditional values have attracted conservative female voters.
But feminists have been turned off by his anti-abortion stance in a country where women can legally terminate a pregnancy only to save the life of the mother or in cases of incest or rape.
On “Hoy,” a mix between ABC’s “The View” and NBC’s “Today” show, Calderon called for stricter regulations of day care centers to benefit working parents, increased government aid for single mothers and universal health care.
He talked about his own children, recounting that when he told his 7-year-old daughter, Maria, about his run for the presidency, she said: “It’s so there won’t be any more children living in the sewers, right, Dad?”
Calderon, of President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, is in a close race with leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who won points with feminists by choosing women to fill half his Cabinet as Mexico City’s mayor. He says he will do the same as president.
Roberto Madrazo, trailing third in the polls as the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000, also appeared on “Hoy.”
Lopez Obrador, who stepped down as mayor last summer to seek the presidency with the Democratic Revolution Party, hosts his own 6 a.m. talk show twice a week and has appeared on morning news programs.
He, too, has criticized macho values. “We don’t accept that. We are equal before the law, men and women, and we should be equal in everything, because women are very intelligent and respected,” he said.
