Mexico's Presidential Race Kicks Off David Luhnow - WSJ.com | |
go to original March 31, 2012 |
The four candidates for Mexico's presidency have officially launched their campaigns for the July 1 election, all of them promising change. Al Jazeera's Franc Contreras reports from Mexico city.
MEXICO CITY — Mexico's presidential campaign began Friday with three main candidates vying for the prize in the July vote: a young ex-governor with movie-star looks, the country's first major female candidate and a messianic former mayor who once preached revolution and now talks about love.
Polls show a big early lead for telegenic Enrique Peña Nieto, a telegenic former governor with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for seven consecutive decades until it lost the presidency in 2000.
An average of six polls published this week, calculated by pollster Mitosfky, showed Mr. Peña leading with 47.6% of the vote compared with 30.2% for Josefina Vázquez Mota of the ruling National Action Party (PAN) and 21.3% for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who narrowly lost the vote six years ago.
The winner and successor to President Felipe Calderón, constitutionally barred from re-election, will take over a country with a raging drug war that has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past five years, a slow-growing economy that has been left in the dust by fast-growing emerging markets like Brazil and India, and a political landscape that has been stuck in gridlock for 15 years."The challenge here is how to govern a country where the three major parties split up the vote, and can't agree on what to do," said Luis Rubio, head of the Cidac think tank in Mexico City.
The two front-runners kicked off their campaigns right after midnight on Friday, the first day of the campaign season under the country's election laws. Mr. Peña told a crowd of flag-waving supporters in Mexico's second city of Guadalajara that it was time for change after 12 years of the conservative PAN.
"Mexicans can and deserve to do better," said Mr. Peña, who has promised to carry out economic reforms that include opening Mexico's closed energy sector to private companies.
Ms. Vázquez, for her part, said she would recruit a "coalition government" that represented the best talent in Mexico—an effort to try to build bridges beyond her party and get legislation passed. Her campaign hasn't yet outlined major policy proposals.
Mexico's drug war looms heavily over the vote, which will include local, state and federal elections. Alleged drug gangs have already threatened at least 13 candidates for various posts among the coalition of leftist parties that support Mr. López Obrador, telling them to step down or be killed, the party said this week.
One mayoral candidate's brother was kidnapped for six hours by a presumed drug gang with a message to tell the candidate not to run, the party said.
But the drug war isn't a divisive issue, because voters generally back Mr. Calderón's offensive against drug gangs, and all three major candidates have vowed to broadly continue the fight, albeit with different tactics.
Some analysts say the race may get much closer than current polls suggest. One reason is that about 25% of voters are still undecided, and in past elections they have tended to break against the PRI, which is still viewed negatively by many Mexicans for its history of corruption and cronyism in power.
In the past two elections, the PRI candidate lost ground between March and Election Day, while the PAN candidate ended up gaining ground.
Mr. Peña has also been slowly declining in polls over the past year, losing about 10 percentage points to his current level. Late last year, he blundered when he couldn't name three books he had read raising questions about his intellect. Ms. Vázquez, meanwhile, has gained about 10 percentage points, partly as the result of securing her party's primary and becoming better known.
"To make this interesting, the PAN needs to convince the undecided voters to come out and vote for them," said Luis de la Calle, a former deputy trade minister and political consultant. "But the party needs to give them a reason to turn out."
A big factor in Mr. Peña's favor are new campaign rules that limit the campaign season to three months, outlaw attack ads, and set limits on television spending that will let the PRI run 40% of all TV spots versus just 28% for the PAN.
"It's possible that Ms. Vásquez Mota and Mr. López Obrador can catch Mr. Peña, but the rules of the game make it unlikely," Luis Carlos Ugalde, the former head of Mexico's electoral agency, wrote on the political website El Palenque this week.
A victory by the PRI would cap a remarkable comeback for a party that ran Mexico for 71 years until it lost in 2000 to Vicente Fox. The centrist party very nearly fell apart due to infighting and came in a distant third place in the last presidential election in 2006.
But it has been helped by its rivals. The PAN has proved ineffectual in power, unable to control a civil war among Mexico's drug cartels or tackle the country's biggest problems, from a dysfunctional judicial system to corrupt labor unions to monopolies that dominate the economy and suffocate competition.
While economic stability under the PAN has paid off in the form of a growing middle class, Mexico's average annual economic growth during the past decade has been an anemic 2.5%.
The Democratic Revolution Party, meanwhile, has suffered from Mr. López Obrador's reaction to his narrow loss six years ago, when he refused to recognize Mr. Calderón's win, led months of street protests that railed against the country's "oligarchy," and claimed himself to be the "legitimate" president—scaring off many voters along the way. To woo back the middle class, he has now recast himself as a candidate of "love" without class rancor.
For many voters, the election is shaping up as a choice between the lesser of three evils. Do they want to keep the ineffectual PAN or go back to the PRI, seen as capable but corrupt? Or do they want to roll the dice with Mr. López Obrador?
"I don't really like any of them," said Héctor Ortega, 42, who runs an outdoor stand that sells sweets on a street corner in Mexico City.
So far, the most far-reaching proposals during the precampaign months have come from the PRI, including a plan to change Mexico's constitution and allow state oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos to partner with foreign oil companies.
That kind of talk has spurred hope that Mexico may finally break out of its gridlock. But given that the PRI itself helped block many reforms in the past decade, some investors still need convincing.
"Mr. Peña Nieto has identified many of the key reforms that are required to boost the economy's potential growth rate, [but] it remains to be seen whether he and the PRI can deliver," wrote David Rees, an economist at Capital Economics in London, adding that he was "cautiously optimistic."
Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com
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