Presidential Hopefuls Weave World Cup Into Their Pitch

It was halftime in Mexico’s opening match of the World Cup tournament in Germany. But for 6,000 soccer-mad Mexicans watching it live here on giant TV screens Sunday, the ball was still in play.

Standing on a platform before a scrum of photographers, a balding, bespectacled man in blue jeans and a green Team Mexico shirt drove the crowd into a frenzy. His sharp left-footed shots sailed into different seating sections of the covered bullring, giving nearly every spectator a chance to catch a souvenir ball.

In Mexico, it’s hard to compete with the World Cup for attention, but Felipe Calderon, the middle-age kicker and presidential candidate of the governing National Action Party, was trying his best.

“Let’s go, Mexicans! Let’s go for a victory in Germany and a victory in the presidential race!” Calderon shouted later, basking in Mexico’s 3-1 win over Iran.

The campaign for Mexico’s July 2 election has collided head-on with the most popular sporting event on the planet, a monthlong tournament among 32 national teams that began Friday. Pollsters have confirmed the obvious: At least two-thirds of Mexico’s voters are more attuned to the World Cup than to the contentious, unpredictable three-man race to succeed President Vicente Fox.

Upstaged, the candidates have shifted gears to identify with the national team, prompting the newsmagazine Cambio to observe that the race has been “football-ized.”

In Yucatan state Sunday, presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party told 2,000 people at a rally that he was keeping one eye on the campaign and one eye on the soccer championship.

“Mexico is and always will be my team,” he said.

Rival candidate Roberto Madrazo, after watching Mexico’s victory with relatives and friends at a Mexico City hotel, announced that he had taken a cue from the team’s winning second-half strategy and hit on a formula to overcome his third-place standing in the polls.

Explaining it in soccer jargon, Madrazo said his Institutional Revolutionary Party’s campaign apparatus “will reinforce its midfield,” take the offensive, and close strongly. “We’re going for a third goal,” he said.

But it was Calderon who made the splashiest effort to fuse his campaign with the national longing for Mexico’s first World Cup title.

Seated in the bullring with his wife, three children and stalwarts of his right-wing party, known as the PAN, the candidate grabbed a large Mexican flag from an aide after each of Mexico’s goals. His flag-waving image was flashed in a corner of the big screens during the replay of each goal.

The halftime show, animated by PAN cheerleaders with pompoms, featured elements of a Calderon “soccer strategy” devised weeks ago.

Switching away from the telecast from Germany, the big screens displayed footage that included Calderon’s pep talk to the national team before its departure from Mexico, campaign endorsements by three of the team’s players and highlights of the candidate’s play-making skills during a pickup match on the campaign trail.

The PAN says it is giving away 25,000 soccer balls during Calderon’s campaign appearances around the country.

Other candidates have jumped on the soccer bandwagon. Lopez Obrador, who is more of a baseball fan, sent his own inspirational message to the national team during a nationwide TV interview: “Willpower is fundamental in politics, in sport, in everything.”

Madrazo has said that his party, too, plans campaign rallies around big-screen telecasts of Mexico’s coming matches.

Whether any of these gestures will sway voter preferences is still unclear, pollsters say. Despite his visible cheerleading, Calderon found himself on the defensive Sunday, forced to use paid TV time during the match to deny Lopez Obrador’s charges that Calderon’s brother-in-law dodged taxes on earnings from energy contracts awarded while Calderon was energy minister.

Political commentators gauging the World Cup’s influence have focused more speculation on how the team’s performance will affect the vote.

The most popular theory holds that if Mexico has not been eliminated from the competition before election day, Mexicans will swell with nationalist pride, conclude that the country is on the right track and vote to keep the PAN in power.

In his speech after the match, however, Calderon portrayed himself more as a candidate of change, distancing himself from the economic and political paralysis of the Fox years.

“Just as Mexico won today, on the basis of conviction and effort, I tell you, friends: We’re going to have a winning Mexico, strong and sure of itself ... a Mexico with a different history after July 2,” Calderon said.