Mexico Trucker Online

MEXICO CITY — After Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute announced that there would be no official winner in Mexico’s presidential election until later this week, Felipe Calderón confidently took to the stage at his party’s headquarters, rattled off a list of exit polls and declared that his National Action Party had won six more years in the presidency.

Then he and his collaborators closed themselves in the party’s war room for five nail-biting hours, watching preliminary results trickle in — just to make sure that the exit polls that gave the conservative candidate the win were right.

By 3 a.m. Monday, Calderón’s lead had dipped to about 260,000 votes — less than one percentage point ahead of leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. But Calderón kept his cool, cheering his campaign team on.

“Obviously, when you’re tired and you’ve been sitting in there for almost 24 hours, it does get people on edge,” said collaborator Arturo Sarukhan, who was with Calderón as the votes came in.

But the Harvard-educated economist and lawyer, often portrayed as a serious figure in public, let loose his sharp sense of humor as the night wore on.

“He was pulling jokes on everyone, he was having fun,” Sarukhan said. “Every little number that came out he would applaud and say, ‘Let’s go, team, let’s go.’”

The party’s number crunchers kept tabs on the tallies, calculating that his narrow vote margin would be statistically impossible for López Obrador to overcome if Calderon could maintain it once 85 percent of the ballots were counted.

The mark was hit at 5:30 a.m. Monday. That’s when the seriousness returned.

Instead of launching into a celebration, Calderón hugged everyone in the room and he said, “‘Everyone, let’s go to sleep,’” Sarukhan said.

Calderón gave a brief television interview in the morning and met with his party’s legal strategists at PAN’s headquarters. He then retired for some rest with his family at home, where he is expected to avoid public appearances until the election results are made official.

His team’s strategy is to hunker down and keep quiet until then.

With 98 percent of the votes tallied, showing Calderón with an unofficial 380,000-vote lead, the PAN is preparing for what it knows will be a major assault from the Democratic Revolution Party and López Obrador.

The results “will not be overturned,” Calderón said in the televised interview.

“The grave thing is to be questioning what 44 million Mexicans decided,” he said.

“It is time that the result be recognized.”