Mexico City – Conservative Felipe Calderon pledged Sunday to win Mexico’s closely fought presidential election by a solid margin, insisting he is the safe option against a vindictive and radical leftist rival.
The race between front-runners Calderon and Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is too close to call ahead of the July 2 vote.
Doing his best to look presidential despite weary eyes and a voice that cracked at times, Calderon addressed about 100,000 raucous supporters in his final campaign event in the capital before the election.
He stressed a central campaign theme, saying his chief rival Lopez Obrador would push the country into financial crisis.
“Our adversaries represent an alternative of hate and slander,” said Calderon, the candidate of President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party. “They want to cheat Mexicans with lies that they will magically increase their wages.” Polls show Lopez Obrador about even with Calderon among Mexico’s more than 71 million eligible voters. Calderon predicted he would win by a comfortable margin of about 1.5 million votes. Turnout in the last presidential election in 2000 was 64 percent.
In third place is Roberto Madrazo, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party controlled Mexico’s president from 1929 until a stunning loss to Fox six years ago. Fox is barred by the constitution from running again.
Even as he bashed Lopez Obrador, Calderon insisted he was a unifier. He seized on a popular Lopez Obrador slogan – that he would send Fox’s party to “history’s trash bin.” “As president, I won’t send even my worst enemies to any trash bin,” he countered.
Calderon said the election pits “those who profess hate and division between Mexicans against those who want unity and harmony.” Lopez Obrador, who was a popular mayor before resigning in July to seek the presidency, has responded to Calderon’s attacks by branding the ruling-party candidate a career politician and mouthpiece for the rich.
Calderon’s rally filled the cavernous Estadio Azteca soccer stadium to the brim, with onlookers occupying even the last rows.
To achieve that, it took hundreds of buses that brought in Calderon’s supporters from across Mexico.
It was the largest crowd of his campaign and a change in style for Calderon, who unlike Lopez Obrador usually addresses small groups rather than mass rallies.
Lopez Obrador, who was campaigning in Hidalgo and Guerrero states on Sunday, will wrap up his campaign at a rally in Mexico City’s grand central square, the Zocalo, on Wednesday, the last day campaigning is permitted before the vote.
Calderon, meanwhile, plans to spend his final hours on the stump in Guadalajara, Mexico’s conservative and religious second-largest city.
Calderon spoke on a stage built to look like an “X” mark on a ballot Sunday, with his wife and three small children in tow.
“I know Mexico’s problems and the ways to solve them,” Calderon said, promising to create jobs to reduce illegal immigration to the United States and provide universal health care while improving education.
The rally had a carnival atmosphere, with men on stilts waving white campaign flags and supporters batting beach balls on the soccer field. Others danced to drum beats and waved placards, while outside the stadium revelers gyrated to blaring music. Some supporters donned rubber Calderon masks.
Francisco Villareal, 66, said he voted for leftist candidates in the past, but now supports Calderon because he seems less corrupt than the other options.
“He seems like an honest person,” said Villareal, who said he was between jobs.
Calderon, who briefly served as Fox’s energy secretary, was not Fox’s first choice, but still easily won a primary race. Promising to build on what the president has begun, Calderon started in third place, well behind Lopez Obrador and Madrazo.
But as he took an aggressive line against Lopez Obrador, he soon leapfrogged Madrazo to move even with the former mayor, of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party.
“After hearing over and over again that it was impossible,” he said, “we are just eight little days away from victory.”
