Mexico – A New Allende?Maimon Schwarzschild
At latest count, the centre-right candidate in Mexico, Felipe Calderon, has a narrow lead over the Hugo Chavez-style leftist Manuel Lopez Obrador, in a three-party race (the corrupt old PRI that ruled Mexico for decades being the third). Michael Barone has a fascinating post on the election, and on the actual administration of the vote, which Barone says is admirable:
Mexico has a better system guarding against election fraud today than we have in most of the United States. Its voter ID program is much more rigorous. It has paper ballots, which take more time to count, but which also provide a paper trail for recounts. It has a national superintending electoral administrative agency, which our federal system of holding elections would not permit.
But a close victory by Calderon may not be accepted peacefully by the Left. Honest elections are a very recent arrival in Mexico: the PRI controlled the “elections” unscrupulously through most of the twentieth century. And as Barone says,
American politics has been poisoned over the last six years because many Democrats have believed that the Republicans stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush. Mexico faces the risk that many PRDistas will believe that PANistas stole the 2006 election for Felipe Calderon. This is a downside risk for democratic states in part because aficionados of left parties are more inclined than their opponents to believe, when they have been declared the losers, that they really won. They believe that they occupy the moral high ground as defenders of the poor (Lopez Obrador surely has a better claim on that title than America’s Democrats) and because they are more open to the idea that powerful conspirators have manipulated the process (as opposed to Milwaukee Democrats taking advantage of election-day-registration laws by importing Chicago blacks to vote in marginal Wisconsin).
One Mexican blogger, Mark in Mexico, has been a very reliable observer throughout the election campaign. He gives the latest official results – as of this morning, Calderon has a narrow lead – and a worrisome warning that Lopez Obrador is already egging on his supporters to refuse to accept defeat, with violence in the offing.
Well, it’s starting. Based upon what I have seen and heard this morning, this is going to get nasty and AMLO [A. Manuel Lopez Obrador] is the demagogue that his political opponents have been portraying him to be.
He just concluded an interview… where he claims he has won and will not accept any other result. He said, unbelievably, “Go to the IFE and see the results. They have declared me the winner.” That’s not even close to the truth. The IFE’s results show that Calderon leads AMLO by about 1.5 percent of the vote and the IFE is not declaring anyone the winner and will not until at least Wednesday. Calderon has been forced to respond. Calderon also suggests visiting the IFE where the federal elections board has him with a 1.5 percent lead over AMLO. That is true.
(“IFE” is the Federal Election Commission, admired by all – very much including Michael Barone.)
AMLO is stoking the fires of a popular revolt, a la Chavez.
That popular revolt has already manifested itself in Oaxaca. The president of the state’s IFE has been kidnapped by some striking teachers’ union members… The teachers attacked the [election] headquarters and took votes, election officials and police as hostages.
The world Left still mourns for Salvador Allende, who tried to establish a Communist regime in Chile in the 1970s with a plurality of about 35% of the vote. Lopez Obrador could well be the new Allende if he bids to take power despite narrowly failing to win a plurality of the vote.
UPDATE: Felipe Calderon is claiming victory. According to the Reuters report, Lopez Obrador says he will accept defeat if the votes are against him “in the count we conduct”. This is equivocal at best. The Election Commission (“IFE”) is meant to count the votes, not Lopez Obrador and his supporters. Mexico – and its neighbour to the north – may be in for troubled times, depending a lot on what one man, Manuel Lopez Obrador, decides to say and do: assuming, as now seems very likely, that the vote count goes against him.