Mexico Trucker Online

MEXICO CITY — President Vicente Fox is being asked to take a step back from this nation’s presidential campaign and not play favorites.

Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Roberto Madrazo, in a letter to Fox publicized Tuesday, asked that the outgoing president not impede Mexico’s democracy by publicly supporting a candidate in the 2006 presidential race.

Madrazo, who’s running third among the three major candidates in virtually all polls, needs to shake things up if he’s to have a chance in the July 2 election.

Madrazo, whose party is known as the PRI, contends Fox should not show favoritism for Felipe Calderón, who was Fox’s energy minister and is a member of the president’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN.

“Permit me to remind you that when you were campaigning, on a daily basis, you appealed to (in 2000 to then-President Ernesto Zedillo) not to take sides in the campaign struggle,” Madrazo wrote.

The letter, which was delivered to Fox’s office by messenger Monday, goes on to say that the president should stop trying to sway public opinion.

It doesn’t offer any specifics as to what Fox has done to show favoritism.

Fox has not made any appearances with Calderón, whose campaign formally started Jan. 19.

Madrazo’s staff contends Fox uses the phrase, “Courage and Passion for Mexico” while traveling the country, especially when speaking to peasant groups — a core area of support for Madrazo.

It is the same phrase that appears in Calderón commercials and speaks to Calderón packaging himself as the candidate willing and able to continue Fox’s agenda and the changes that began with Fox’s defeat of the PRI in 2000.

Before that loss, the PRI ruled Mexico for more than 70 years.

Fox’s spokesman Rubén Aguilar declined to respond to Madrazo’s letter.

“The president of the republic will make absolutely no comment regarding what is said by the candidates or their staff or their campaign strategies,” he said.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the populist front-runner for the presidency, kept his distance from Madrazo, with whom he has fought bitterly in the past.

“The López Obrador campaign has nothing to say about the actions of the other party’s candidate,” spokesman Fernando Vásquez said.

While López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party sits atop the polls, Madrazo is leading a PRI that finds itself the underdog in a presidential race for the first time.

The PRI is hoping return to power by appealing to voters who think Fox failed to deliver on campaign promises to fix the country and to those who want change, but fear López Obrador’s leftist party.

Under Mexican law, the president serves one six-year term, and can’t seek re-election.

Kenneth Greene, a Mexico expert at the University of Texas at Austin, said Madrazo likely still will trail come election day, but it remains to be seen how many of his supporters will defect along the way to follow a perceived winner.

“The question is: Will Madrazo voters defect to support Calderon or López Obrador? The evidence is they would split almost evenly,” Greene said last week.