Mexico has come a long way since the 1976 presidential election when José López Portillo, the dominant party’s hand-picked candidate, ran unopposed because every opposition candidate boycotted the election, complaining of blatant fraud.
It was an easy win for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, but the PRI began to spiral downward after that embarrassing campaign until it was defeated by Vicente Fox in the historic 2000 presidential election.
Now, without a run-off system to produce an absolute majority for the winning candidate, Mexico is confronting a different kind of messy electoral outcome.
According to official results, only 236,076 votes separated the top two candidates out of a total of 41 million votes cast.
After several days of see-saw results failed to produce a winner, a recount of voting center tally sheets – not a full recount of ballots – by Mexico’s federal election agency declared Felipe Calderón, a conservative from the National Action Party (PAN), the winner with 0.57 percentage- point margin of victory over rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The big loser was Robert Madrazo, the nominee of the once-dominant PRI, who could muster only 20 percent of the vote.
But the closest presidential race in Mexican history isn’t over, because López Obrador alleges widespread vote-rigging and promises to take mounds of evidence to the electoral court to turn the results in his favor.
Although Mexico has spent the last 15 years working to correct the electoral regularities of the 1988 election, there are solid reasons to doubt the 2006 results, and there are enough irregularities to require a full recount of what happened on July 2.
Some of the ballots that were opened for inspection showed that mistakes were made in the final tally, mostly in favor of Calderón. Thousands of ballots were reported to be found in a garbage dump. The election commission’s conduct has raised doubts about its true independence, particularly because it failed to use its enforcement powers to halt pre-election violations.
President Bush’s decision to congratulate Calderon for his victory was ill-timed and embarrassing to Calderon and his advisers.
However the election turns out, the sour results from a polarized nation may make effective governing almost impossible.
The “winner” will be a minority candidate with a weak and fractured mandate to rule the nation. This is hardly a recipe for political legitimacy, and it may test the strength of political institutions in a country sharply divided by region, class and political ideology.
The affects of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the failure of free- market economic reforms have polarized Mexico demographically, a polarization deeply rooted in divisions between the poor rural south and the wealthier urban north.
Until the results are ratified by the Federal Electoral Tribunal, a process that could last until the end of August, Mexicans won’t know whether they have a president-elect or an annulment.
David W. Dent of Broomfield is professor emeritus at Towson University and author of the “Historical Dictionary of U.S.-Latin American Relations.”
