Mexico and its sensible choice

First election after dictatorship is joyous; second can be deadly. Not here

Something unusual is going on in Mexico — a normal presidential election. Mexico’s relatively new democratic institutions are not being strained, and are not at risk. There are three major candidates, and while they have been doing a lot of mudslinging, they offer voters a real ideological choice.

Mexico lived through 71 years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which fell in 2000 to an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, who proved to be a lacklustre president. In other new democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin America, voters at this point have tended to grow nostalgic for dictatorship or eager to find an outsider who promises revolution. The first democratic election after dictatorship is always joyous; the second one can be deadly.

Not so in Mexico. Roberto Madrazo, the PRI candidate, is far back. One front-runner is Felipe Calderon, who was Mr Fox’s energy minister. He is a respectable model of the Latin American colourless, Harvard-educated, pro-business candidate. He wants to modernise Mexico and make it more globally competitive, thereby creating more jobs. Mr Calderon advocates opening Mexico’s poorly run and underfinanced energy sector to foreign investment. It is an unpopular idea, but sorely needed.

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His neck-and-neck opponent is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has been unfairly compared, by the Calderon campaign and many others, to President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Mr Lopez Obrador, who was recently mayor of Mexico City, is a leftist, but he is no threat to the United States, nor to Mexico. He has no ambitions to foment revolution and stresses the importance of good relations with Washington. He accepts a market economy, but would attempt to make it fairer to Mexico’s poor. Mr Lopez Obrador has said that he would like to use government spending to create jobs and raise the minimum wage — now $4.50 a day. He wants to renegotiate the agricultural chapters of the North American Free Trade Agreement to benefit Mexico’s small farmers.

His financial management of Mexico City was relatively responsible. But Mr Lopez Obrador ran a political machine that mirrored the PRI’s machine nationwide and was not a fan of transparency in government. He reacted to a million-person march against crime by calling it an attempt by dark forces to attack him.

From an editorial in ‘The New York Times’, June 19

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