MEXICO faced the threat of civil unrest yesterday after Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftwing candidate in the country’s presidential election, said he was denied victory by fraud and vote-buying.

Addressing 250,000 angry supporters on Saturday, Señor López Obrador called on the poor and dispossessed from every corner of his country to protest. “We are certain that we won on July 2, and we are going to defend our victory,” he declared.

Official results show that Señor Obrador lost to Felipe Calderón, the centre-right candidate, by 243,000 votes out of the 41 million cast.

The Left was last night preparing detailed allegations of vote-rigging across 300 districts, which it will file with the Mexican federal electoral tribunal. The Democratic Revolutionary Party also promises to challenge Señor Calderón’s victory in the Supreme Court. But Señor López Obrador, a fiery populist and former Mayor of Mexico City, is not merely contesting the result through the legal process. He is taking his demand for a full recount to the people.

He has called on Mexicans to start converging on the capital on Wednesday in a “National March for Democracy”. That should culminate in another huge demonstration on Sunday. He insisted the protests would be peaceful, but Señor López Obrador gave warning that “if there is not democracy there will be instability”.

He declined to say what his party would do if the courts failed to order a recount, saying only that “peace is the fruit of justice”. He told a crowd on Saturday in the Zócalo, a square in Mexico City: “We are confronting a powerful group, economically and politically, that are accustomed to winning at all costs, without moral scruples . . . They are the ones who want to put a servant in the presidency.”

Although Mexico has a long history of voting fraud and political corruption, EU election monitors said that they had found no irregularities. The law allows for a full recount only where there is credible evidence of irregularities. But Señor López Obrador says hundreds of thousands of votes for him were missed when the official tally was made last week. He alleges that the computerised voting system was rigged. Legal challenges were built into Mexico’s democracy in recent years to help to ensure fair elections, so Señor Calderón cannot be declared President until the courts have weighed the allegations. The federal tribunal has until September 6 to finish.

Señor Calderón insists that the vote was clean and has taken a congratulatory phone call from President Bush. He has made clear that he will not renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and he wants to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the US by attracting investment for more jobs back home.

Washington regards the former Energy Minister as a likely ally. The US certainly prefers him to Señor López Obrador, whose class-based rhetoric and agenda have strong echoes of PresidentChávez of Venezuela, America’s declared enemy in Latin America.

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