While Mexico City’s populist former mayor is far ahead in the polls, the coming presidential election is far from over, observers said at a conference here Friday.
Anything could happen in an election in which the issues have yet to be defined and voters are fed up with politicians and impatient with democracy.
That all three of Mexico’s major political parties have a chance to capture the presidency this year “is really unusual,” said Alejandro Moreno, a Mexico City political scientist and pollster. “This is a totally different election.”
With campaigns for the July 2 election kicking into gear, academics and political leaders gathered at the University of Texas at Austin to analyze the race cautioned that current polls might not reflect voter attitudes in five months.
“There is a substantial volatility in the Mexican electorate. One-third are ‘floating’ voters,” said Chappell Lawson, a professor with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “What we do not know is which voters are most likely to show up on election day.”
In Mexico’s last presidential election, in 2000, voters all along the political spectrum defied the polls and elected Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN.
They simply wanted to knock out the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled like a dictatorship for more than 70 years.
However, the towering, mustached Fox can’t run for re-election and many voters wonder if he promised far more than he could deliver.
Voters this year will choose from a field led by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador; the PAN’s Felipe Calderón, a former energy secretary; and Roberto Madrazo, former national president of the PRI.
The latest poll by Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper, pegged López Obrador with the support of 40 percent of potential voters, Calderón with 30 percent and Madrazo with 26 percent.
Most striking so far is that the PRI, for the first time ever, is campaigning as the underdog in a presidential race.
While their ideologies and personalities are distinct, the candidates largely have avoided taking stands other than universal ones most voters agree on: The economy should be stronger, corruption should be reduced and streets should be safer.
With regard to the United States, the three parties seem to agree that immigration is the defining issue. While some U.S. politicians want to seal the border as much as possible, Mexican politicians want to create ways for more workers to legally earn money in the United States.
Roderic Camp, a Mexico expert at Claremont-McKenna College, said the clearest trend among voters is a lack of party loyalty.
“The average voter regards politics as corrupt and parties as part of this corruption,” he said.
López Obrador has packaged himself as a candidate who would bring change, while Calderón is seen as most likely to continue Fox’s program.
Madrazo, campaigning as the candidate who can best make the government function, wants to tap into voter frustration with what’s seen as Fox’s failure to better their lives.
Analysts agreed that Calderón or López Obrador are more likely to pull voters from Madrazo’s traditional base than Madrazo would be in attracting voters from other parties.
“I would expect to see some defection from the PRI,” Alejandro Poire of Harvard University said. “Not much, but perhaps enough to make a difference in the outcome.”
Cecila Romero, Calderón’s coordinator of international affairs, boiled down the obvious.
“We are at a defining moment,” she said. “And July 2, we must choose a path
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