Fox Campaigns for His Image

President Vicente Fox has a new mission: cheerleading for his country’s super-achievers.

Fox has begun inviting prominent Mexicans to his weekly radio broadcast and prodding them, Oprah-like, to reveal the secrets of their success. Gone are dull Cabinet ministers who filled the airwaves with minutiae about government. The first show of the new format, last Saturday, featured a soccer hero, a champion race car driver and a wealthy businesswoman.

“Well, here we are with three winners, listening to how they climbed to the top,” Fox marveled. “We all have the power to do that when we are so committed and decisive.”

The president’s venture into “uplift radio,” as critics call it, coincides with falling expectations among Fox and his aides for what he can achieve in the remaining 23 months of his six-year term. Stymied by an opposition-led Congress and unable to seek reelection, he has all but abandoned the fight for his promised economic and judicial reforms.

Instead, he is waging a retrospective image campaign, through his radio program and TV spots, to equate the Fox legacy with expanding opportunity in Mexico.

His program has plenty of competition. One reflection of his waning clout is the instant popularity of a new television satire that portrays Mexico as paralyzed by nasty infighting among Fox and other politicos over who will succeed him next year. The Monday night show, “The Privilege of Leading,” has an audience of 12.4 million, dwarfing that of his radio program.

Fox has apparently been striving in recent public remarks to enhance his place in history as the maverick whose election ended 71 years of authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

“Our passage to democracy has brought clear changes that today mean a better Mexico,” he said last month on the fourth anniversary of his inauguration. He added that his administration had fostered a climate of openness and free expression, made the country a showcase of financial stability and reduced the number of Mexicans living in poverty.

“There are many problems in this country, but nobody can deny that there are important advances,” he told foreign correspondents a few days later.

Not once during the hourlong news conference did Fox mention the centerpieces of his reform agenda, even when asked which ones he still hoped Congress would enact. When he took office with a plan to overhaul the tax and labor codes and liberalize energy and telecommunications markets, he had vowed to make the economy more open to private investment and competitive in the world.

Mexican Finance Minister Francisco Gil Diaz, speaking in Washington on Monday, said passage of that agenda was “something that I don’t think is very likely” before Fox leaves office “but that should concern the next government.”

Even Fox’s 10-month-old initiative to modernize a dysfunctional criminal justice system, the one major reform for which there was thought to be pressing popular demand and a multiparty consensus, is bogged down in a Senate committee. The PRI opposes every key part of the bill: provisions that would replace written arguments with oral trials, strengthen the presumption of a defendant’s innocence, and invalidate confessions not repeated before a judge.

The president’s prickly relations with Congress have turned into open hostility. In November, the PRI and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, which together hold a majority, adopted a federal budget full of pork to benefit state governments under their control. Knowing that his veto would be overridden, Fox was forced to publish the budget as law and then protest it to the Supreme Court.

“The opposition is trying to make President Fox more than a lame duck, they are trying to take over,” said Juan Molinar, a leading congressman from Fox’s center-right National Action Party. “The president is being forced to spend the rest of his term struggling to keep his programs funded. There is not much more he can do.”

The mood of resignation at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, is reflected in its latest advertising spots on TV and radio. Ordinary Mexicans talk on the air in upbeat tones about improvements in their lives, but the accompanying message has a new emphasis: It is up to Mexicans themselves to make the best of things; the administration has done what it can.

One slogan in the ads: “Mexico is changing. And you?”

Despite his limitations, Fox remains relatively popular, scoring a 54% approval rating in the Televisa network’s latest poll. But his positive portrayal of Mexico is becoming an election campaign issue, as opposition candidates stack it up against a host of festering problems: eroding economic competitiveness, a huge gap between rich and poor, a jobless economic recovery after three years of stagnation.

“It strikes me that whenever I see commercials on television, they say that Mexico is better,” Roberto Madrazo, the PRI leader and aspiring presidential candidate, told a group of farmers last month. “It is time to raise our voices and unmask these lies and deceptions.”

The new success-story theme of the president’s radio program, “Fox Contigo,” (Fox With You), offers plenty of fodder for such criticism. Francisco de Dios, general director of publicity and media at Los Pinos, said the format was inspired by focus groups that indicated Mexicans were “tired of politicians fighting among themselves” and wanted more civility and “positive news about the country.”

Kicking off the new format, Fox set up Hugo Sanchez, once Mexico’s greatest soccer player and now a winning coach, to score a goal for him on the air.

Asked by Fox for advice on how Mexico could get ahead, Sanchez said, “As individuals we are outstanding, but we need to learn to work as a team.”

“Bravo! Bravo, Hugo,” Fox said.

Fox’s knack for this kind of motivational work once served him well as a Coca-Cola sales executive. The president instructed aides to come up with the new format after the program’s audience slipped, from a peak of 300,000 listeners in early 2001 to 190,000 in recent weeks.

But the image makers’ assertion that Mexicans are weary of partisan conflict is not holding up. When “The Privilege of Leading” debuted on Televisa this month, millions tuned in to relish the satire of their politicians’ low blows.

The character Chente, a bumbling hick based on Fox and played by Alfonso Villalpando, is part of the mix, along with his wife, Marta, and sidekick Santiago. They represent First Lady Marta Sahagun and Interior Minister Santiago Creel, both of whom have presidential ambitions.

One episode flashes back to the characters’ childhood on the same playground. Chente, Marta and Santiago line up for a game of dodge ball. The opposing team is led by Andres Manuel, a character based on Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the PRD, who is resisting a move by Fox’s government to have the courts exclude him from the presidential race.

When the ball hits Andres Manuel, his foes squeal with joy: “You’re out! You’re out!”

“How can I be out? The ball didn’t touch me,” Andres Manuel whines. “This is a conspiracy!”

Fox’s aides said he had not seen “Privilege” but considered it a product of the climate of freedom he promotes. The program offers the boldest spoof of a Mexican president seen on TV here; producer Reynaldo Lopez said its popularity was also rooted in Mexicans’ newfound passion for freewheeling politics.

“Political strife here is going to get worse as the election approaches, and that is what nourishes this program,” said Lopez, who tries to heap equal ridicule on each party. “I would gladly change the program to make it more civil, but civility does not exist in Mexico right now.”