In Mexico, Candidates Go Toe to Toe Before Futbol

The two leading contenders in Mexico’s presidential race faced off in their only debate of the campaign Tuesday, a potentially decisive event that saw a conservative and a leftist offer radically different solutions to the problems of unemployment, crime and migration.

Rarely have Mexican voters faced such a stark choice as they do in this election, with conservative Felipe Calderon and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador standing clearly on opposite sides of a wide ideological divide.

The contrast was evident Tuesday, with Calderon calling for fiscal responsibility and a “firm hand” against crime, and Lopez Obrador saying he would end the “privileges” of the Mexican elite as part of a war on poverty.

Three polls released Tuesday showed the two men in a statistical dead heat less than a month before the July 2 election.

The debate was a last opportunity to reach voters ahead of Mexico’s first game in soccer’s World Cup on Sunday. Whoever loses Tuesday’s debate might find it difficult to make up ground in this soccer-obsessed country, especially if Mexico progresses to the tournament’s second round.

“Futbol ... will take control of the public consciousness,” columnist Rafael Ruiz Harrell wrote Saturday in the newspaper Reforma. “On the field and with the ball rolling, no one cares about the gross domestic product, the crime rate or the inequality of salaries....”

At Tuesday’s debate, all five of the candidates on the ballot shared a single stage. But only the two men at the head of the polls engaged in face-to-face attacks.

Calderon of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, suggested that a Lopez Obrador presidency would bring anarchy and financial collapse. He attacked Lopez Obrador’s record as mayor of Mexico City.

“It would be worthwhile for the former mayor to explain to us how he managed to transform Mexico City into the most crime-ridden and corrupt city in Mexico,” Calderon said.

Lopez Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party shot back, describing a Mexico in which the rich, including Calderon’s brother-in-law, escape paying taxes.

It isn’t right “that a few people have everything and that the majority suffers from lack of basic needs,” he said.

Already, the campaign has seen more dramatic turns than a lucha libre wrestling match, with a couple of farcical episodes thrown in for good measure.

Trailing Lopez Obrador by as much as 10 points in some polls in March, Calderon made up ground with a series of black-and-white television attack ads that suggested the leftist’s proposals for public works programs and subsidies to the poor would bankrupt the country.

The spots, crafted with the help of a conservative media consultant from Spain, helped Calderon surge ahead in many polls. But Mexico’s election authority forced Calderon to withdraw the ads this month, calling them character assassinations that violate the country’s strict election laws.

In mid-May, after weeks of eschewing the media, Lopez Obrador began striking back: Among other things, he sat down for an hourlong interview with a comedian-clown called Brozo, who is one of Mexico’s most important tastemakers. Lopez Obrador surged back into a tie.

The debate echoed the themes of the campaign, which was officially launched in January.

Lopez Obrador is calling for an increase in subsidies to the poor and public works projects to stimulate the Mexican economy. He says certain elements of the North American Free Trade Agreement should be renegotiated, especially those that will eliminate tariffs on U.S. corn and beans in 2008.

Calderon promises to continue the free-market policies of outgoing President Vicente Fox, also of PAN, who cannot seek reelection. He says enticing more foreign investment will create the jobs necessary to stop Mexicans from migrating to the U.S.

Lopez Obrador skipped the first debate, in April, a decision that appeared to accelerate his slide in the polls. Candidate Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which dominated Mexican politics for much of the 20th century, was seen as the big loser in that forum. He lags behind the leaders by a substantial margin in most polls.

Thanks to the Calderon ads, many independent voters had developed doubts about Lopez Obrador, said Pamela Starr of Eurasia Group, a risk analysis firm.

Lopez Obrador may have dispelled some of those doubts in his many television appearances and by his calm demeanor at Tuesday’s debate.

“What voters saw was an individual who seems sincere about helping Mexico, a man who is not the crazy firebrand populist he was made out to be,” Starr said.

This week, a new challenge emerged for the Lopez Obrador campaign: Attorneys for an Argentine entrepreneur jailed here on corruption charges announced that they would release secretly recorded videos showing Lopez Obrador’s aides accepting bribes when he was mayor of Mexico City.

Lopez Obrador’s allies said the videos were a crude attempt at extortion. Then, just hours before the debate, the entrepreneur’s attorneys said they would not release the tapes. Someone had shot at the entrepreneur’s family, apparently from a passing car, but his wife and three children all emerged unscathed.

Some were suggesting that the “attack” was itself a staged campaign dirty trick.

“It’s painful to say so, but the possibility that this was a provocation or a staged event should be investigated,” a spokesman for the Democratic Revolution Party said in a written statement.