HE may or may not be elected president of Mexico today but in one not insignificant respect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City, seems assured a healthy future — he may have cornered the Aztec witch doctor vote.
Lurking at the back of the huge crowd that filled the capital’s historic Zocalo square for the closing rally of the presidential campaign, a small group of tribal Indian shamans, or medicine men, nodded sagely as Lopez Obrador, who is known by his initials, Amlo, promised to “make history” by getting rid of “mediocre and thieving politicians”.
The shamans had turned up in the city centre carrying large pouches filled with Amazonian plants and the bodies of small animals. They had hoped to make money offering ritual exorcisms of illnesses and evil spirits, and were surprised to find the square filled with tens of thousands of people chanting “Viva Amlo”.
The shamans stayed to enjoy the show, but there may be further surprises in store as Mexico votes in its first presidential election since the 71-year-old political monopoly of the formerly all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) was broken by President Vicente Fox six years ago.
This year’s poll has riveted international attention on the prospect of yet another Latin American nation joining the left-wing populist advance led by Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s fire-breathing anti-American president.
For most of the past week, Amlo, 52, has been confidently predicting that he will “make history” by succeeding Fox as Mexico’s first president to champion the poor. He was ahead by up to three points in the last opinion polls made public a week ago.
He devoted much of his final speech to his plans for his first week as president-elect, and thousands of his supporters have been wearing badges that read: “Smile, we’re going to win.”
Yet victory is by no means certain for the man who casts himself as a caped Mexican superhero — called “Ray of Hope Man” — and who has promised to take only half the president’s salary if elected. A last-minute surge by Felipe Calderon, Lopez Obrador’s conservative opponent, may confound the populist trend and plunge Mexico into a volatile post-election brawl over the conduct of the polls.
Under Mexican election laws,opinion polls are banned for the final week of the campaign, but that did not stop an elite club of pollsters and prominent political analysts swapping the details of their private research at their monthly lunch on Wednesday.
Before the food was served, the 10 pollsters and 24 analysts held a straw poll on who they thought would win the election, according to Guillermo Valdes Castellano, a political consultant who was present. Of the 34 votes cast, 24 went to Calderon and only 10 to Lopez Obrador.
Valdes Castellano said he had spoken to Calderon’s private pollster, whose daily tracking polls showed that the Harvard-educated candidate of Fox’s National Action party (PAN) had jumped from three points behind 10 days ago to three points ahead by Tuesday.
Much of the apparent swing may have been attributable to a last-minute barrage of negative television and radio advertisements paid for by Calderon, 44, a prematurely balding former energy minister who is so colourless that even his friends say he was “born in a suit and tie”.
Until last week Calderon’s most talked-about contribution to the campaign had been a vulgar television spot promoting his anti-crime policies as so tough that criminals were scared. The clip showed a supposed criminal wetting his trousers.
Calderon’s less than inspirational manifesto focused on stability and modest reform, but he appears to have been making steady ground by portraying Lopez Obrador as a Chavez-style radical whose reckless promises threaten fiscal chaos and rampant inflation.
Forced onto the defensive, the former mayor has repeatedly denied that he is another Chavez — and has also been obliged to deny that his supporters will riot if he is robbed of victory.
The impact of Calderon’s warnings becomes obvious in the recently yuppified Mexico City neighbourhood of Condesa, a formerly shabby art deco district that is now filled with stylish new architecture, hip boutiques and Starbucks coffee shops.
Condesa’s transformation reflects the explosive growth of the Mexican middle class during the past decade of comparative oil-fuelled prosperity.
Not only has the number of families in middle-class income brackets soared from 5.4m in 1992 to almost 10m today, but the number of people taking out mortgages and car loans has been growing by 40% a year for the past four years.
Alejandra Zarraga, a married graphic artist with a small baby, belongs to the newly prosperous middle class, and she is terrified that Lopez Obrador is going to cause a budgetary crisis that will cost her her new house — a pleasant two-bedroom villa on a tree-shaded Condesa street. “If my mortgage goes up, I’m finished,” she said.
“The message Calderon is giving to families is that interest rates will go up,” said Valdes Castellano. “Under the Fox government 3m people bought houses for the first time. The number of people buying new cars has doubled. They have all got bank loans, and they are all afraid of Lopez Obrador.”
Yet it is equally true that Condesa owes much of its new look to Amlo’s success as Mexico City’s mayor from 2000-05. He revised traffic flows, reduced pollution and encouraged development. He did it all without bankrupting the city, and says he can succeed on a national scale by cutting government corruption and waste to pay for his welfare programmes.
Amlo’s closing rally left little doubt that his message has impressed a broad swathe of Mexico’s long-neglected poor, from the urban labourers who marched into the Zocalo under communist flags to the rural Indians who arrived on buses from Chiapas province, the home of Subcomandante Marcos and his so-called Zapatista rebellion. If the poor turn out to vote en masse, Amlo may yet end up smiling.
“The message from both candidates is basically the same,” concluded Valdes Castellano. “They are both saying, ‘I will improve your lifestyle and make sure you have more money’. That’s why the campaign in the last days has been to attack the credibility of the other. The vote is about who has the most credibility.”
Calderon ended his campaign last week by accusing Lopez Obrador of deceiving Mexicans “with the lie that their income will increase as if by magic”. Whether he wins or loses Amlo may need some help from those Aztec shamans.
