WEALTHY Mexicans are nervous that next Sunday’s presidential election will be won by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who proclaims himself a champion of the poor and whose supporters dress as cockerels. They are equally nervous about what might happen if Lopez Obrador loses.

After a hard-fought race against Felipe Calderon, his main conservative rival, Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, enters the final week of campaigning with a two-point opinion poll lead.

The closeness of the campaign and the passions it has aroused have raised the spectre of an inconclusive result that could lead to paralysis if Lopez Obrador claims he is being cheated of victory.

The threats of mass demonstrations and court challenges are complicating the outlook for the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking country.

Concerned that delays in the counting process might inflame accusations of fraud, the local election commission promised last week to announce the result within hours of the polls closing. One aide to Lopez Obrador forecast that the candidate would not call on his supporters to “shut down offices, cause chaos or problems” if Calderon emerges the winner: “We will go to the courts instead.”

Yet all the evidence suggests that Mexico is split down the middle about the charismatic 52-year-old candidate whose critics have likened him to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who is attempting to build an anti-US alliance across Latin America.

With the tropical sun beating down last week Lopez Obrador appeared at a raucous rally in Salina Cruz, southern Mexico, wearing a straw hat and a garland of flowers. Shrugging off criticism from President Vicente Fox, who has described him as a “dangerous populist”, the man universally known by his initials, Amlo, brought the house down with a sharp riposte: “I say to Fox: shut up, chachalaca.”

The reference to a squawking bird drew howls of glee from his supporters and typified the approach of a candidate who has promised to halve his own salary if he is elected president.

Yet with victory now within his grasp Lopez Obrador has also been taking steps to reassure critics who fear that Mexico’s oil-fuelled economic gains of the past five years will be jeopardised if he tries to fulfil his many other promises. (These include building up to 1m homes with subsidised rents for the poor, to provide pensions for the elderly, grants for single mothers and free medicine for the needy.)

On a visit to Monterrey, a northern conservative bastion close to the border with Texas, Lopez Obrador insisted on Tuesday that he was not going to “load the country with debt . . . and spark inflation”, as his critics charge. He insisted that his social programmes can be paid for by cutting corruption, reducing tax evasion and trimming bureaucratic jobs.

Lopez Obrador’s emergence as a presidential contender reflects a deep division in Mexican society that has risen to the surface for the first time in a modern election. Although he is the product of a middle-class family of shopkeepers, his appeal, like that of Chavez, is unswervingly to the poor and dispossessed who have failed to benefit from oil revenue.

Fox’s free market policies have been credited with stabilising Mexico’s economy after decades of waste. Inflation is at a record low, the central bank’s reserves are at a record high. Yet although sales of crude pump more than $3 billion (£1.65 billion) a month into government coffers and millions of emigrants in the United States send $2 billion a month back to Mexico, the poor continue to trek northward in search of jobs across the border. Countless more stay at home in poverty.

The failure to create jobs has led to spectacular growth of the so-called “black” economy that absorbs 40% of the working population. Lopez Obrador’s solution, described by his aides as a Mexican version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “new deal” for post-depression America, is to launch a public works programme of housing, roads, dams, ports and oil refineries.

“We aim to create jobs that will raise living standards and help to stem emigration,” he explained last week.

Calderon, 43, is a Harvard-trained banker and a former energy minister in Fox’s government. He has sought to play up fears of instability by labelling his rival a “threat to Mexico”. Calderon has also sought to link Lopez Obrador to Chavez, who is seen by many Mexicans as an interfering menace. The former mayor has responded by questioning government contracts awarded to Calderon’s brother-in-law.

With the two main parties seemingly evenly divided, the wild card in the election may turn out to be Roberto Madrazo, who represents the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years until Fox finally broke its hold in 2000.

The PRI’s support is built on old-fashioned conservative, religious Mexicans who have never changed their voting habits. The party has no chance of victory but is likely to collect about 20% of the vote.

With an estimated 10%-15% of voters undecided there is still plenty of scope for an upset. “The worst case for Mexico is a close contest,” said one investment banker in Mexico City. “But as long as the loser accepts the winner, there shouldn’t be a crisis.”

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