Fox on Edge of Campaign Trail

Prevented by the constitution from seeking another term, President Vicente Fox is still running hard, crisscrossing the country four days a week.

Not since his historic election in 2000, which brought an end to one-party rule in Mexico, has Fox traveled as much, his aides say.

Though long-held traditions and a strict election code preclude sitting presidents in Mexico from campaigning for their successors, Fox is clearly trying to give a boost to the candidate of his conservative National Action Party, Felipe Calderon. Mexican voters will select a new president in July.

Though he never mentions any candidate by name, Fox is repeatedly speaking out against “demagoguery” and “populism,” thinly veiled references to front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist former mayor of Mexico City.

Lopez Obrador has proposed dramatic increases to social spending to address the poverty and inequality that he says have been exacerbated by Fox’s pro-market policies.

“You don’t create jobs with demagoguery and populism, by being irresponsible,” Fox told college students last week in this city on the Yucatan Peninsula. “Fiscal and budgetary discipline is indispensable. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.”

Fox’s statements have turned the early stages of the campaign into a daily, cross-country debate that is not only about Mexico’s economic standing and Fox’s policies, but also about the nature of presidential power.

Mexico places strict limits on what presidents can say and do during campaigns because for much of the 20th century each president picked his successor, with the election a formality.

Fox himself was critical of predecessor President Ernesto Zedillo for his statements during the 2000 campaign. Now, in an interview, Fox says he is simply defending his record.

The Lopez Obrador campaign says Fox is subtly dancing around election laws that prevent government officials from using the public dime to aid candidates. During a session of the Senate this month, Sen. Leticia Burgos Ochoa of Lopez Obrador’s Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, accused Fox of “proselytizing on behalf of the candidate of his party.”

“From here, in a very respectful manner, we tell the president: ‘Get your hands off the electoral process,’ ” Burgos Ochoa said.

The PRD said Wednesday that it would present a formal complaint to election officials.

Fox replied that he was merely repeating the principles that have informed his career since he entered politics in the 1980s. “I am defending the ideas in which I believe,” Fox said in an interview aboard the presidential jet. “For me, the road for Mexico to follow is the one of the free market and social responsibility.”

In the interview, Fox said he was proud of the fact that the election would take place in a climate of economic stability, with what he termed “strong institutions” such as the Federal Election Institute. “There will be no economic crisis” this year, Fox said, an apparent reference to the economic chaos that followed Mexico’s devaluation of its currency in the months after balloting in 1994.

The performance of the Mexican Stock Exchange, he said, offers a good measure of investor confidence. “The person who invested $1 on Sept. 1, 2000, [two months after Fox’s election] today has in his pocket $2.50,” Fox said. “That’s not bad.”

Perhaps more than any other Mexican president, Fox focused on improving the business climate here. He seems to fear a Lopez Obrador presidency will undo what he has accomplished.

In the interview, Fox repeated a theme he often takes up on the stump: that President Luis Echeverria, who nationalized the nation’s electric and mining industries in the 1970s, brought ruin with his populist policies.

“Echeverria turned the country to the left,” Fox said. “We are still paying the consequences 30 years later.”

Fox’s most ambitious attempt to bring fiscal responsibility to Mexico failed. In 2003, Congress voted down a law that would have raised taxes on food, medicine, private schools and other goods and services.

On a campaign swing last week through the Yucatan Peninsula, Lopez Obrador recounted Fox’s failed attempt to win his support for the measure and mocked the president’s attempts to boost Calderon, who has been running a consistent second in most polls.

“He can’t even make his candidate rise with the yeast they put in Gansitos,” a popular brand of pastry here, Lopez Obrador said Sunday in Cancun.

Fox’s tour has taken him to the southern state of Yucatan, the central states of Morelos and Tlaxcala, and to the northern state of Sinaloa. On Wednesday, he was back in central Mexico, in Puebla. Aides say the president will continue his travels at least until May.

At each stop, the president rattles off figures and statistics, sounding much like the corporate executive he once was. If Mexico were a corporation, he seems to be arguing, everyone would want to buy its stock.

Mexico has “the seventh-largest trade balance in the world,” and it has negotiated “43 separate free-trade agreements” during his presidency, Fox said at a convention of lottery officials here in Merida.

And yet, Fox will leave behind a country that is in many ways unsettled.

Thousands of his impoverished countrymen head north to illegally cross the border every week, their presence in the U.S. provoking a backlash. The plight of Mexico’s paisanos in the north has become a recurring theme in the campaign.

“Migration will continue because the United States needs it,” he said.

Fox said he still had hope for immigration accord this year that would allow “a legal, orderly and safe flow of workers” to the United States. And he spoke out against a key provision in an immigration bill before the U.S. Congress: 700 miles of new border fencing.

“Building a wall is a mistake,” he said. “It’s not something a democratic country like the United States should do.”

Fox acknowledges that his government hasn’t accomplished all it set out to do. “It is important to recognize that we are a minority government,” he said. “I’m going to keep fighting until the last day I’m in office.”