Best of the Web Today - July 5, 2006
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
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MEXICO CITY--Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party hasn't any doubt that he won Sunday's presidential election, and he says that his adversary, Andres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), knows it, too. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at his campaign headquarters yesterday, Mr. Calderón appeared rested and confident. "I'm not going to get into personalities," he told me, "but all the parties have copies of the tally sheets showing the voting, and the PRD knows that it lost."
Mr. Calderón's numbers jibe with those of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) and it seems almost certain that he won. But as we go to press, an official announcement has not yet been made. A preliminary ruling is scheduled for today, with the official decision to come on Friday. And even then the country may be in for weeks of the Mexican equivalent of challenges to hanging chads.
The big victory in this race goes to the IFE in carrying out a spectacularly clean, transparent and well-organized election. If institutions matter to development, as Nobel laureate Douglass North contends, then Mexico is well on the way to progress. Mr. Calderón echoed the sentiments of millions of Mexicans when he told me yesterday that watching the electoral process made him "proud to be a Mexican." Mexico's next test will be how it stands up to Mr. López Obrador's threat to call street protests if the IFE decision goes against him.
For the past four months this nation has been bracing for a nail-biter of a race. The chief concern was that Mr. López Obrador, a renowned sore loser, would respond in a manner detrimental to Mexican democracy if he were edged out by the competition.
The race was every bit as tight as pollsters had predicted. And by Monday morning when it began to appear that Mr. López Obrador had secured only second place, Mexicans were treated, on national television, to a flash of anger that revealed the trademark intolerance that has made him such a polarizing figure: The red- faced candidate gripped the podium in frustration, pledging to exhaust every available legal channel. His head shook uncontrollably as he demanded that the country "respect" his "triumph." Yesterday, his senior aides told Reuters that his supporters would take to the streets if the election authorities don't go his way.
The problem for Mr. López Obrador is that in order to prevail, he has to do more than convince Mexicans that Mr. Calderón is a thieving opponent who managed a massive conspiracy against the will of the people. He also has to portray the IFE and the thousands of citizen volunteers--who on Sunday put on a clinic for the rest of the world on how to run a transparent and orderly election--as enemies of the Mexican people. That won't be easy, and public opinion is fast turning against him.
The Sunday vote was an amazing electoral symphony, featuring thousands of small polling stations all over this sprawling metropolis, in private homes, schools and community centers. I passed by or visited a mere fraction of them. Yet my impressions were confirmed by wider press reports and independent observers. Everywhere I went, from well-to-do districts in the north and south to the popular neighborhoods downtown, the scene was one of saintly patience and First World order. A summer downpour didn't faze voters one bit. They covered their heads with newspapers, shared umbrellas--and waited.
The rest of the city was calm as well. In the main downtown city square, the Zócalo, which was ground zero for the López Obrador campaign, life was normal. A couple of hammer-and-sickle flags fluttered in the breeze near a tent that read "Zapata Vive"--Zapata Lives--and rickshaw drivers pedaled their passengers through the narrow streets of colonial Mexico.
This city was voting to fill six seats, including that of the president and the mayor. Voters presented identification cards and were handed six large ballots, one for each open office. The names of candidates were also color-coded to assist the illiterate. Voting booths were small, waist-high writing tables enclosed by hanging plastic sheets printed with the reassuring words, "The vote is free and secret." Voters emerged from the booths, folded the ballots and slid each one into the box corresponding to the contested seat. To complete the process, thumbs were marked with indelible ink and ID cards were returned. Observers from each party monitored the flow.
As a former resident of this city, renowned for its "ungovernability," I was profoundly impressed by the precision of this exercise; and official observers echoed my anecdotal observations on Sunday night. Mexico pulled off a near "10" in electoral order.
As polls closed around the country on Sunday evening, poll workers from each party signed off on tally sheets and sent the totals to the IFE. There was a marked absence of complaints from any polling station about irregularities, but there was a surprise. There had been wide expectations that Mr. López Obrador would have the early lead, since this city--which is his stronghold--was expected to report first. Instead, the northern state of Coahuila seems to have reported ahead of the national capital, and so, from the earliest tallies, Mr. Calderón had the lead. It was a lead he would never lose.
The IFE had worked hard to make all this happen and it wasn't about to commit a misstep. IFE president Luis Carlos Ugalde announced at 11 p.m. that Mexicans would have to wait until Wednesday morning for a winner. Still, the transparency of the process was working against Mr. López Obrador, and as polling stations reported--and tallies were posted on the Web--it became clear that Mr. Calderón had won by a whisker. On Sunday evening, the head of the European Union observer team attested to the fairness and transparency of the election.
Mr. López Obrador smelled defeat and swung into action with Plan B. Just after Mr. Ugalde asked the candidates not to declare victory, the PRD candidate jumped in front of the cameras and told all of Mexico that he had won, adding that he had "information" from the "quick count" showing that he was up by 500,000 votes.
It is doubtful that he had any such information. Rather it looked like classic López Obrador, working to arouse suspicion among his supporters that the establishment had carried out "a plot" against them. Arturo Sarukhan, campaign adviser for the PAN (Mr. Calderón's party), told me that his side had no choice but to respond: "We were standing in the 'war room' at campaign headquarters, discussing how to calibrate Felipe Calderón's message in light of the request that Mr. Ugalde had made when we heard him [Mr. López Obrador] claiming a lead of 500,000 votes. That's when we decided we had to report the independent exit polls." Mr. Calderón appeared shortly thereafter on television, rattling off a string of independent exit polls that showed him in the lead.
Mr. López Obrador now claims that there are three million "lost" votes, and that he senses all kinds of "irregularities," none of which are backed up with evidence. While all the votes are not yet in the official tallies because of a technicality in reporting, the Calderón team remains confident that they are accounted for in the totals that all parties now have, and that the outcome will not change.
Mr. Calderón, for his part, is reaching out to his political competition and looking presidential and civil. In a clear reference to the López Obrador campaign, he told me on Tuesday that Mexicans sent a message at the polls that they want a tolerant, pluralistic society, not one of "hatred." This "is the hour of reconciliation and unity." He is already talking about a coalition government that will reach across the aisle to get things done, and has noted that the way in which Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has worked across parties lines has been instructive to him.
In the past 48 hours, Mexico has watched two distinct management styles unfold. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the very reason that Mr. Calderón seems set to take the office of president is precisely because Mexicans feared the López Obrador they are now witnessing.
Ms. O'Grady, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, is editor of the weekly Americas column.
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