Mexico Debate Appears to Settle Nothing

The morning after the last debate of a hard-fought presidential campaign, many Mexicans agreed that the two heavyweights in the race had fought their way to a bloody tie.

Leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon each could point Wednesday to post-debate surveys showing he was the winner. And each scored points in his battle to win over voters ahead of the July 2 election.

Greeting supporters in Mexico City’s central square, Lopez Obrador claimed victory in the colloquial Spanish that is his trademark.

“They thought that since I talk slow, and never in a hurry, they were going to feast on a little pigeon,” he said of his debate opponents. “Instead they got a fighting rooster. And they haven’t plucked a single feather from our rooster.”

Calderon told a crowd at the headquarters of his National Action Party that his performance in the debate would allow him to surge far ahead of Lopez Obrador, breaking the dead heat reflected in three polls this week.

“We are going to win, friends, because we have the best proposals, because my hands are clean” of corruption, Calderon said.

One thing was clear: The Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose Spanish-language initials, PRI, loomed over Mexico’s political landscape for decades, would not be returning to power any time soon.

PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo, a former governor who began the campaign as one of the most feared politicians in Mexico, played a minor supporting role in the debate, which featured all five of the candidates on the ballot.

Madrazo has been plagued by corruption allegations and is trailing Calderon and Lopez Obrador in polls, with the support of slightly more than a quarter of Mexico’s prospective voters.

The Mexico City newspaper Reforma published interviews with 24 leading political commentators Wednesday, most of whom agreed that Madrazo had done little in the debate to help his campaign. Francisco Calderon, a cartoonist, summarized Madrazo’s performance with a single word: “Adios.” Writer Rafael Segovia was only slightly more verbose: “He wasn’t there.”

Still, the PRI retains the powerful apparatus it built during its seven decades of rule, when Mexico was a virtual one-party state. Many analysts agree that the election could be decided by longtime PRI voters who will abandon Madrazo for either Calderon or Lopez Obrador.

Already, several PRI leaders have declared they will not vote for Madrazo. Sen. Manuel Bartlett Diaz said last month that he would support Lopez Obrador, from the Democratic Revolution Party, and encouraged other PRI members to do the same.

“The National Action Party is the historical adversary of the PRI,” Bartlett Diaz said. “The PRI has to vote for ... the candidate who has the best chance of beating the right wing. And that person is the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party.”

This week another senator, Genaro Borrego Estrada, resigned from the PRI and suggested he would vote for Calderon.

Political analyst Rossana Fuentes argues that because the Democratic Revolution Party was itself founded by disaffected PRI members, Lopez Obrador has the advantage in winning over PRI voters.

“The ‘tactical vote’ of the PRI rank and file will give him the victory,” Fuentes said. What’s more, she added, the leftist party will probably make a stronger get-out-the-vote push than the National Action Party.

Lopez Obrador adopted a deliberately understated tone in Tuesday’s debate, several observers noted. It appeared to be an attempt to counter the perception, fostered by a slew of Calderon’s attack ads, that he is a loudmouth populist cut from the same cloth as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Calderon was clearly the more polished and aggressive debater. Rattling off a series of anti-crime measures, he seemed to target both his conservative base and middle-class voters concerned about Mexico’s relentless crime wave. Among other things, he called for life in prison for convicted kidnappers.

Analyst Denise Dresser told Reforma that Calderon was the candidate who “plants fear in the hope of harvesting votes.” Whether that message is one a majority of Mexicans will embrace remains to be seen, she said.