Presidential Campaigning Winds Down

Presidential candidate Felipe Calderon strode from the players’ tunnel onto the floor of the capital’s Aztec Stadium on Sunday, and more than 100,000 supporters chanted his name at his last rally before the July 2 election.

“Fe-li-pe, Fe-li-pe,” yelled the capacity crowd, with fans waving pennants and balloons in the orange, blue and white of Calderon’s National Action Party.

With his wife and three young children, Calderon walked to all four corners of a stage that covered half the stadium’s famed soccer field. The family smiled and waved, a campaign portrait of an idealized Mexico of good jobs, good credit and good prospects.

Amplified to “deafening” by an 80,000-watt sound system, the chorus of Calderon’s pop-style theme song summed up his campaign promise: So we can live better.

Calderon has only a few days left in a tight race with leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to persuade Mexican voters to maintain the pro-market path of President Vicente Fox, which brought some positive change but still has left half the country in poverty.

A conservative lawyer and economist, Calderon delivered the same proposals Sunday he’s made in all 31 of Mexico’s states since his national campaign began six months ago: more jobs, universal healthcare, safer streets, better education, more investment and fewer reasons to emigrate.

The 43-year-old wore a blue button-down shirt and dark sports coat over tan slacks, the weekend uniform of a stand-up guy with a graduate degree from Harvard.

Calderon also repeated his campaign’s warning: that Lopez Obrador would be a stubborn, big-spending menace who would trigger inflation, debilitating federal debt and other economic troubles.

Lopez Obrador, former mayor of Mexico City, holds a slight edge in polls and is wildly popular in the capital and among the rural poor. He has promised to reduce poverty through subsidies to single mothers and the elderly, as well as ambitious public works. The Democratic Revolution Party candidate will hold his final rally in the capital’s central square Wednesday, by law the last day of campaigning.

“Poverty is cured by jobs, and for that reason I will be the jobs president of Mexico,” Calderon said in his speech.

He promised to close the wide gap between the rich and the poor, one of the reasons millions of Mexicans have gone to the United States.

Victor Alfonso Peralta, 21, counts himself among the prospering Mexicans who have come of age under Fox and his National Action Party.

Peralta graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a degree in international relations and works as a supervisor for Sam’s Club, the big-box retailer owned by Wal-Mart.

“We’ve had stability and I don’t see why we should change the economic model now,” said Peralta, who sat with his family. “I want my own home, my own car and to have my own family.... I’m afraid Lopez Obrador might end up like politicians from the past and suppress the people who oppose his ideas.”

In 2000, Fox became the first presidential candidate in seven decades to defeat the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had run Mexico through a combination of patronage, cooption, corruption and force. Fox, like all Mexican officeholders, cannot run for reelection. The PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, is third in most polls.

The country’s progress after generations of single-party rule can be easily measured, said Juan Hernandez, a former Texas literature professor who worked on the Fox campaign and then headed a federal office for Mexicans living abroad.

“The most exciting thing about today,” he said as he surveyed the stadium, “is that we know who people vote for is who will win. Of Fox’s accomplishments, this is the biggest, that whoever the people want will win, and everyone believes it.”