Vicente Fox has seen one anti-climatic failure after another during his term of office. His anointed successor, Felipe Calderon, had been leading in the polls for president. (The PRI has failed to field a successful comeback candidate–Roberto Madrazo looks out of the running.) Now Calderon, the PAN candidate, appears to be in a too-close-to-call finish to the race with PRD candidate Andres Manuel López Obrador.
Now the question for Mexican voters comes down to a judgment on Fox’s term. His six years in office started with great fanfare and expectations. In the first months of George W. Bush’s first term Mexico was treated like the most important ally. It is hard to believe that now given the tensions between the countries, mostly instigated by right-wing Republicans but reaching to areas such as support for the Iraq invasion (Mexico did not give it). The international record of Fox in other matters includes making enemies with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez recently and a May 2004 diplomatic row with Cuba, traditionally a country with good or decent relations with Mexico.
Domestically, Fox has never managed to gain a legislative majority for his PAN party and has not passed many of the reforms he came in promising. Would Calderon do any better in a country that seems unlikely to elect a right-leaning majority any time soon? The sale of oil has brought revenues, and Fox has overseen some economic progress. But just as Brazil’s Lula was treated like a bogeyman before his election, many publications like to portray Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, as a left-wing revolutionary. The New Republic went to its normal depths by portraying Obrador as a fire-breathing, pistol-slinging Tobasco comrade cowboy, while The Economist hissed thusly on Obrador’s debate performance: “His man kept his sometimes volatile temper under tight control. But he seemed punch-drunk at times, oddly swaying back and forth. Having been the frontrunner for so long, he seems to have forgotten how to play the challenger.“
When a man has enemies like these, who call him “angry” because of their anger at his relatively positive and optimistic plans for a more progressive agenda in a country still dealing with large areas of poverty and crime, it is time for the people of Mexico to make him their president.
[photo: AP]