Both sides refuse to concede Mexican election
Ruling party candidate Felipe Calderon declared victory in Mexico’s closest presidential race ever, saying today that his 370,000-vote lead was insurmountable.
But his leftist rival refused to concede and electoral officials said they wouldn’t declare a winner for days.
Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador huddled in his apartment with close advisers, trying to determine how to challenge the results that increasingly indicated a loss.
In a television appearance today, he insisted he had won and didn’t rule out street protests.
Mexico’s stock market, currency and bonds rallied sharply on news of Calderon’s lead.
The preliminary tally, with results from 97.38% of polling places, gave Calderon 36.37% of the vote and Lopez Obrador 35.4%.
But the Federal Electoral Institute stressed those results were not final - and said it would declare a victor after an official tally of tens of thousands of ballot boxes, beginning on Wednesday.
Neither candidate waited for significant results to declare himself the winner, raising questions about their pledges to respect an electoral process in which Mexicans invested hundreds of millions of pounds to overcome decades of systematic fraud.
“We have no doubt that we have won the presidential election,” Calderon told supporters last night.
“Smile: We’ve already won,” Lopez Obrador told his.
Lopez Obrador said his party’s polls showed him winning by 500,000 votes.
In an appearance on the Televisa network, he said he wanted to gather facts before announcing his next move.
“Have patience,” he told backers. “We are going to be keeping our supporters informed. We are always going to act responsibly. If we lose the elections I will recognise that. But if we won the vote, I’m going to defend my triumph.”
Calderon, appearing on the same network, said preliminary results showed that he had won.
“They give me a very, very clear victory,” he said.
Thousands of Lopez Obrador supporters gathered under a steady rain in Mexico City’s enormous Zocalo plaza last night chanted “Lie! Lie! Fraud! Fraud!” when the Federal Electoral Institute announced the race was too close to call.
“We’re going to defend our triumph. We aren’t going to let them try to make our results disappear,” Lopez Obrador assured them.
Calderon, meanwhile, said he would begin building a coalition government. He didn’t say whether he would meet with Lopez Obrador.
“Right now, I want all Mexicans to be calm because we won,” he said.
Tensions were already running high after a campaign marked by vicious personal attacks.
Calderon painted Lopez Obrador as a radical leftist who would ruin the economy, while Lopez Obrador called Calderon a liar who doled out million-pound favours to a brother-in-law while serving as energy secretary.
The campaign exposed Mexico’s deep class divisions, with Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party pledging to govern for the poor and Calderon, of the ruling National Action Party, seen by many as the candidate of the rich.
For decades, elections were rigged to ensure the ruling party’s victory - fraud that allegedly included the 1988 presidential count in which a computer crash was blamed for a stunning turnaround that ensured another six years in power for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Many members of Democratic Revolution regret not fighting harder to challenge the loss of leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who went on to found their party.
“This is no longer the era of fraud, because the people will not accept it. It is no longer ’88,” Lopez Obrador said Sunday night.
In part because of outrage over the 1988 elections, the PRI was defeated in 2000 after 71 years in power, and sank to a distant third Sunday.
President Vicente Fox, who finishes his single six-year term in December, appealed for patience and calm.
US ambassador Tony Garza, who served as an election observer in a poor Mexico City neighbourhood, said he was “convinced Mexicans will wait patiently and prudently as the Federal Electoral Institute reviews today’s voting records.”
In other races, National Action won governors contests in the states of Morelos, Guanajuato and Jalisco, while Marcelo Ebrard of Democratic Revolution took the Mexico City mayor’s post by a landslide.
National Action appeared to win the most seats in both houses of Congress - but was far from a majority in either. The PRI fell into third place in Congress for the first time.
The estimated 11 million Mexicans living in the United States were allowed to vote from abroad for the first time, but the 32,632 ballots they cast weren’t likely to make much of a difference.
“The main thing is, the door has been opened,” said Jesus Hernandez, who sent in his ballot from California. ”Later, we can reconstruct the procedures to make it easier in the future.”
