Mexican election sure to affect ties with U.S.

MEXICO CITY — When Mexican voters pick a new president next month, the election will be closely watched from north of the border, where its outcome is certain to have an impact.

A victory by leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador on July 2 would add an emphatic exclamation point to a series of Latin American elections in which voters roundly rejected the so-called "Washington consensus," the model that emphasizes fiscal discipline and the free market.

A victory by conservative candidate Felipe Calderón might make Mexico a stronger U.S. ally than ever before.

"I suspect the Bush administration would prefer Calderón," said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, D.C. "There's a greater likelihood of continuity with Calderón. It would eliminate any concern about making connections to other leaders in South America that they have doubts about."

Still, analysts in the United States and Mexico note that López Obrador has not made Washington or U.S. business a target of his stump speeches.

"Both López Obrador and Calderón have been very moderate and very mature in the way they've handled the topic of the relationship with the U.S. in the campaign," said Gabriel Guerra Castellanos, a former Mexican diplomat and presidential spokesman. Both candidates have resisted the temptation to play the Yankee-bashing card with voters, he said.

Once trailing badly in the polls, Calderón surged into a virtual tie in March, when he began attacking López Obrador as a dangerous radical, saying his proposals to increase spending on social programs and public-works projects would bankrupt the country and bring back hyperinflation.

A prominent business group in the northern state of Nuevo Leon said this month that it would go on a "tax strike" if López Obrador were elected.

On the campaign trail, López Obrador says he wants to win by a wide margin so the economic elite "doesn't try to haggle us out of our victory." Recent polls suggest López Obrador has reclaimed his lead.

With Mexican voters more polarized between rich and poor than at any time since the 1910 revolution, there's talk that the United States' most populous neighbor — and the main source of its legal and illegal immigration — could descend into political anarchy and economic crisis in the hours after election night.

"The democracy Mexico has built is fragile," said Enrique Krauze, a Mexican historian and essayist. "If the result of the election isn't respected by all parties, there could be chaos. Politics is the fastest theater in the world. Anything could happen."

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ruled Mexico with a firm hand for seven decades. The party kept together a country with strong regional and class divisions.

The election of Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, in 2000 put an end to the system by which each president handpicked his successor. But Fox proved to be an ineffective leader. He couldn't push through the tax reform that was at the heart of his economic plan, and failed to get a new airport built for Mexico City.

Nor has Fox been able to make good on a key promise he made at the beginning of his presidency: that his friendship with a like-minded President Bush would quickly bring a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws in the United States.

"There's widespread agreement that things cannot continue as they are [with legislative gridlock and a weak president]," Guerra said. "No matter who wins the election, we will see a more effective executive."

Calderón is something of an unknown quantity as a leader. He was president of the PAN and was briefly energy secretary under Fox, but never has held elective office. He has promised to continue Fox's free-trade policies.

In the recent presidential debate, Calderón said he would negotiate a new accord with the United States and Canada to stimulate investment in the areas of Mexico that have sent a lot of migrants north. He said Mexico needed to keep close economic ties with the United States.

"The world has changed ... and we have to change our mentality," Calderón said. "It's not enough to put your head in the sand and close yourself off."

López Obrador took a different tack. He suggested that keeping a strong economy at home was the best way to reduce immigration.

"I believe the best foreign policy is a domestic one," he said during the debate. "If we do things right in Mexico — if we clean our house, if there is progress in our country, if there is justice, security and political and social stability — we will be respected abroad."

Stephen Johnson, a Latin America specialist at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., said Calderón would appeal more to the Bush administration because his platform "has a more detailed free-market economic approach."

But there is only a remote chance that a López Obrador victory would bring a radical shift in the relationship with the United States, Johnson testified to Congress this spring.

Mexico "is not a country that would be comfortable going back to one-party rule or to an extensive government presence in the economy," Johnson said. Nevertheless, some of López Obrador's more radical supporters expect him to move in that direction, and, Johnson said, "it will be his dilemma to find a way to deal with that."

During the debate, López Obrador hinted at a more confrontational approach to Washington if he became president, saying he would order all 45 Mexican consulates in the United States to establish extensions of the attorney general's office to defend the rights of immigrants against discrimination.

"The next president of Mexico is not going to be a puppet of any foreign government," López Obrador said. "We will have a relationship of mutual respect with the North American government."

If López Obrador were to win, it would mark a turn to the left, "but to the European social-democratic left of Brazil, Chile and Argentina, rather than the more populist, authoritarian left of [Venezuela's Hugo] Chávez and [Bolivia's Evo] Morales," said Robert Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University and a National Security Council official in the 1970s.

A López Obrador victory "would be a reflection of the fact that the principal challenge in Mexico remains poverty and inequality," Pastor said.

Bush administration officials have avoided public comment on López Obrador's candidacy except to say they would cooperate with whoever wins. Many regional experts doubt that a victory by the populist candidate would cause a major disruption in the relationship.

U.S. analysts note that it would be difficult for any Mexican leader to radically alter the country's growing interdependence with the United States. If López Obrador were elected, he would need strong U.S.-Mexican economic ties to help pay for increased social benefits he has promised the poor, they say.