Elections in Mexico: Perilous Days Ahead

This already has become a reality: a June 16 survey by the Mexico City daily Excelsior found that at least half the country expects that one of the three major presidential candidates will not passively accept the results of a narrow defeat.

Polls suggest that the top two candidates – Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) - are locked into an unusually tight race. Even if the outcome is not disputed, the winner on July 2 will be forced to deal with a sharply divided legislature. And the incoming president will have won only a thin plurality of votes: no candidate has topped 40 percent in national surveys in recent weeks. As the country hurtles towards election day, one thing is certain: the path both before and after July 2 is bound to be treacherous.

Another Eruption

In the past three months, pervasive unrest has challenged the stability of President Vicente Fox’s remaining days in office. The violent suppression of a steelworkers’ strike in Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacan and the bloody resolution of a standoff between police and vendors in San Salvador Atenco, compounded fears that social tensions were fast approaching a breaking point.

On June 14, police brutally attempted to break up a protest by approximately 40,000 teachers who had occupied the central plaza in the city of Oaxaca for nearly a month. The demonstrators were demanding an increase in wages to compensate for the rising living costs in the state. As negotiations with Oaxacan governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz became increasingly hostile, the teachers began to demand his resignation, citing “his incompetence and fascist nature.”

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