Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rails against ”the privileged” in a staccato voice that softens as he turns to the virtues of ”the poor” and a cheeky grin accompanies the thumbs up to go with his latest slogan: ”Smile, we are going to win.”
Depending on who you talk to, the presidential candidate, who holds a narrow lead in the opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s Mexican elections, is the great hope of the downtrodden, a messianic danger to stability, or a crafty pragmatist. This son of a shopkeeper from the marshy backwaters of south-eastern Mexico is striking a chord, and inciting discord, in a country where half the population is poor and the richest 10% own 45% of the wealth.
As the election approaches, opinion polls give the candidate of the Party of Democratic Revolution a slight lead over Felipe Calderon of the governing centre-right National Action party.
If Lopez Obrador wins, Latin America’s much talked about leftward march — through Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile — will have leapt north to reach the back door of the United States. If he loses, in the wake of electoral disappointments in Colombia and Peru, it will look like the retreat has begun.
Not that there is much uniformity among the region’s left-wing leaders, from the pugnacious bravado of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to the eminently reasonable Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Most observers put Lopez Obrador somewhere in the middle.
The 52-year-old former mayor of Mexico City is a strong leader with a certain magnetism, a sense of mission and an apparently limitless belief in himself. But he also seems happy to accept that at least half of Mexico’s electorate is traditionally conservative, which, together with the country’s 3 000km border with the US, puts important limits on how far left he can go without a backlash.
So though his rhetoric can sound radical, Lopez Obrador’s policy proposals are hardly revolutionary. They include food handouts for the elderly, household energy subsidies and massive investment in infrastructure to kick-start Mexico’s sluggish economy — all to be paid for, he says, by cutting top bureaucratic salaries in half, including the president’s.
”He will head a progressive government,” says Manuel Camacho, one of the candidate’s small inner circle. ”It is not possible for a genuinely left-wing government to take power in Mexico, not via the ballot box, and not through force either.”
The Bush administration seems to agree. Though it openly voices concern about Chávez and his Bolivian ally, Evo Morales, there is no sign of alarm at the possibility of a Lopez Obrador victory. Not so among Mexico’s business community, which spits fire at his name and has thrown its weight behind his main rival, Calderon.
A comparatively grey candidate with little obvious political charm, Calderon promises job creation through market-led reforms in a stable environment. But polls show that his chance of winning rests on the success of a negative campaign to convince voters that Lopez Obrador is a closet authoritarian prepared to throw fiscal responsibility to the wind and plunge the country into economic crisis.
Few Mexicans can forget the devastating crisis of 1995, the last of the meltdowns that dogged the final decades of the deeply corrupt single-party regime that installed itself in power in 1929.
The Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) kept political control for 71 years through patronage, selective repression and electoral fraud. Its legendary electoral machine can still keep its candidate, Roberto Madrazo, only a few points behind the frontrunners today.
The PRI lost the last presidential elections in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the PAN, who unified opposition to the regime behind his slogan ”Change”.
Fox prepares to leave office appreciated by the general public for keeping crisis at bay, being relatively honest and generally pleasant. But he also departs vilified as weak and ineffective, having failed to push through all but a fraction of his reform programme.
Fox’s limp legacy allows Lopez Obrador to claim he is the ”real change” that the electorate has wanted all along. With many of his diehard supporters convinced that only fraud can snatch victory from their hero, the possibility of tension on the streets is real if his main rival wins by a narrow margin.
Love him, hate him or just watch him, Lopez Obrador is the candidate to beat, and may well remain at the centre of the post-electoral show even if he loses. — Â