WASHINGTON: If there isn’t an agreed-upon translation for ‘hanging chad’ in Spanish, it looks as if there soon will be. Mexico’s watershed presidential election ended up ‘tight as a tick’, as Dan Rather would have said, and both stakes and passions are still so high that it’s hard to imagine either candidate backing down.
In fact, the race between free-marketeer Felipe Calderón and leftist-populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known in Mexico by his initials, AMLO) tightened considerably after the polls closed on Sunday and the preliminary count showed Calderón winning by a margin of one percentage point. Inclusion of some ballots that had been set aside trimmed that gap, and then Calderón was proclaimed the winner on Thursday by about half a percentage point — roughly 200,000 votes out of 41 million cast for the two men and other minor candidates.
AMLO clearly has studied the playbook from the Florida debacle in 2000. He has demanded a full recount of every single ballot — not just the tally sheets from each ballot box, as was done in the official count. He has claimed there were ‘irregularities’ in the voting and vowed to appeal to the Federal Judicial Electoral Tribunal, which will have until September 6 to make a final ruling. And AMLO has an ace up his sleeve: Campaign officials have threatened street demonstrations by his fervent supporters, mostly drawn from the millions of poor and disaffected Mexican citizens who already suspect the election was somehow stolen from them.
The response from Calderón, who is theoretically in the better position, since every count has shown him the narrow winner, was to offer AMLO a seat in his new cabinet. That gesture may, ironically, be seen more as a sign of weakness than strength. Calderón is asking the question that Rodney King asked: “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” AMLO is following the precepts of that other noted political philosopher, Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis: “Just win, baby.”
George W. Bush’s life would be immeasurably easier with Calderón running our southern neighbour rather than AMLO. It’s a wonder he hasn’t already dispatched James Baker and a flying squad of Florida recount veterans to teach Calderón a thing or two about — how shall we phrase this? — the way to consolidate a razor-thin presidential election victory that, statistically speaking, may or may not be real.
But there’s a serious lesson from the Mexican election, whatever its outcome. The fact that AMLO was able to finish in a dead heat with Calderón, who vowed to continue the free-market policies of President Vicente Fox, underscores how Latin America as a region is looking to the political left for solutions.
For two decades the region followed a set of prescriptions known as the ‘Washington consensus’ — privatisation, free trade, less regulation. But most Latin economies have been relatively stagnant, compared with other regions, and even in countries such as Chile, where growth was robust, not enough of the bounty has trickled down to the poor majorities who live from hand to mouth.
That’s why Latin voters have elected leftist presidents in recent years such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Evo Morales in Bolivia and, yes, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Alan García, just elected in Peru, would be considered a leftist if he hadn’t been running against a candidate who was even further to the left.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service
