Mexico Judges Name Calderon Winner of Vote

Mexico’s top electoral court on Tuesday declared conservative candidate Felipe Calderon president-elect, clearing the way for him to take office in December but failing to quell the political crisis sparked by the razor-thin margin of the July 2 contest.

The unanimous ruling by the seven judges of the Federal Electoral Tribunal is final and cannot be appealed.

In a radio address Tuesday night from his campaign headquarters, Calderon issued a call for national unity.

“The tribunal has ratified the decision taken by the people at the polls,” he said. “To those who were my opponents ... I invite you to join forces with me on behalf of Mexico. My door always is open to dialogue.”

Nevertheless, supporters of losing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador continued their street protests. The former Mexico City mayor said he would not concede defeat and vowed to set up a parallel government.

Such moves renewed fears of Mexico descending into political chaos, with Sept. 16 -- Mexico’s Independence Day -- looming as a crucial date.

Lopez Obrador has called for a “national convention” that day to “reestablish the republic.” His supporters have said they will not remove their barricades, even though they would be blocking the traditional route of the annual military parade. Mexico’s defense secretary, meanwhile, has said the military has no plans to alter its route.

Leaders of Lopez Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, have also vowed to try to prevent Calderon from taking the oath before Congress, as stipulated by law.

“This political regime is rotten,” Lopez Obrador told a crowd of supporters in a heavy rain in this city’s central square. “I will never stop fighting for my ideas and convictions.... I will never surrender before the rich and the fascists. We will continue in this struggle.”

The court’s final tally, after a two-month saga of ballot recounts and street protests, showed Calderon beating Lopez Obrador by 233,831 votes out of 41 million cast, or 0.56 percentage point, a margin that reflects the sharp divide in the Mexican electorate. Calderon is to take the oath of office Dec. 1, which gives outgoing President Vicente Fox three months to resolve the political crisis and ensure a peaceful succession.

In a boost to Calderon, officials of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose candidate finished third in the presidential race, said they would recognize Calderon as Mexico’s new leader.

Officials of the Democratic Convergence party, one of three parties in the coalition that backed Lopez Obrador’s presidential bid, said they also would recognize the tribunal’s ruling.

“Our coalition [with Lopez Obrador] has officially ended now that the tribunal has rendered its decision,” said Luis Maldonado Venegas, a spokesman for the leftist party, which holds 22 congressional seats.

Fox was sharply criticized in the ruling for actions early in the campaign that were seen by many as an effort to boost Calderon’s candidacy.

On Friday, PRD legislators blocked Fox from delivering his final State of the Nation speech to Congress.

Some observers called the tribunal’s final count deeply flawed. Some also expressed surprise that the judges declined to provide details of their recount of thousands of precincts and their decision to throw out about 230,000 votes.

Others said the ruling was a strong sign of the maturity of Mexico’s democratic institutions.

“In the worst possible scenario, with an election decided by less than 250,000 votes and with a losing candidate who said he would never accept defeat, our system functioned well,” said Sergio Sarmiento, a newspaper columnist.

Two years ago, Calderon was a virtual unknown. The stalwart of the National Action Party, or PAN, is a former congressman and briefly served as energy secretary under Fox.

The Harvard-educated 44-year-old campaigned as the candidate of economic stability and growth through fiscal discipline and greater integration with the global economy. No Mexican president has ever assumed office with a smaller electoral mandate -- Calderon won just 35.7% of the vote.

Lopez Obrador, 52, promised a New Deal-style investment in infrastructure and new subsidies for the poor.

Calderon’s support was strongest in northern Mexico and among the middle class and affluent. Lopez Obrador, whose campaign slogan was “For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First,” performed best in the south.

Both men claimed victory on election night and in the days that followed, setting off a tense, sometimes farcical struggle for power that many believe has tarnished the image of the nation’s nascent democratic institutions.

“Mexico’s political spectrum is split in half, there is no middle ground,” said Lorenzo Meyer, one of the country’s leading historians. “It’s so polarized that it’s clear that whatever the tribunal decided, many people would be unhappy.”

About 800 supporters of Lopez Obrador marched to the tribunal headquarters in the capital late Monday for a vigil. When the verdict was announced at noon Tuesday, they set off fireworks that shook the chambers.

“Felipe Calderon has robbed the people of their victory, and we are angry and indignant,” protester Estela Martinez said. “We will continue our fight and take it to the final consequences.”

Mexico has struggled to create truly democratic institutions. The Federal Electoral Tribunal was formed in the 1990s, after a 1988 presidential election tinged with allegations of fraud. (Leftist candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is widely believed to have been cheated out of victory by the then-dominant PRI.)

When Fox won the presidency in 2000, ending seven decades of PRI rule, the vote was hailed as the country’s first free and fair election. This week, a nationwide poll by the newspaper El Universal found 51% of Mexicans thought the July 2 election was clean and fair, and 39% believed Lopez Obrador had been victimized by fraud.

“When doubts about electoral fraud once again take hold of a substantial part of the population, you can’t say that 2006 is a step forward like 2000 was,” Meyer, the historian, said.

Lopez Obrador’s campaign team said thousands of precinct reports with widespread inconsistencies were proof of an officially backed effort to deprive him of victory.

Last week the tribunal found Lopez Obrador’s charges to be unfounded. Most of the inconsistencies in the reports, it said, were simple arithmetic and bureaucratic mistakes.

On Tuesday, tribunal Justice Alfonsina Navarro Hidalgo said the irregularities cited by Lopez Obrador did not meet the legal standard needed to overturn the result. “There are no perfect elections,” she said. “To think otherwise is a utopia.... Elections are, like all human endeavors, susceptible to the failings of men.”

Justice Eloy Fuentes Cerda said the tribunal was prohibited by law from ordering the recount of all 41 million votes sought by Lopez Obrador. The judges could recount ballots only in precincts where the plaintiffs provided proof of inconsistencies and errors.

In arguing for the vote to be annulled, Lopez Obrador alleged that business groups had poured unregulated money into defeating him, some of it via an ad that focused on leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

But the judges said Tuesday that Lopez Obrador’s campaign had failed to provide key evidence to back his claims, including details on the number of ads and how many times they had aired.

The judges harshly criticized Fox, who recorded a number of public-service spots during the campaign that were seen as thinly veiled attempts to help Calderon. Laws here limit what incumbent presidents can say to help ruling-party candidates.

The panel found that Fox’s statements “put at risk the validity of the election.”

But it said a court order in February that forced Fox to stop airing the spots was sufficient to level the playing field.

Many observers here were highly critical of the tribunal, saying its lack of public debate on the issues left Mexicans wondering whether the judges had truly considered Lopez Obrador’s arguments.

“They didn’t do what they could have done to clear up many doubts,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching. “I don’t consider myself a radical person, or a leftist ... but I am a person interested in transparency, democracy and clarity, and this ruling doesn’t satisfy me.”

Last month, the judges ordered ballots recounted in more than 11,000 precincts, but they did not release the results of that recount Tuesday.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com

Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.