Uncertainty In Mexico…
…after last night’s cliffhanger. It appears Calderon is the victor, but the results are not official and neither candidate is ready to concede:
Two bitter rivals declared themselves winners of Mexico’s extraordinarily close presidential race even though election officials said official results wouldn’t be ready for days — sparking cries of fraud from supporters and fears of violence.
The candidates — a conservative bureaucrat and a leftist — were separated by fewer than 300,000 votes with more than 30 million counted in a preliminary tally by electoral officials. The conservative, Felipe Calderon, had 36.9 percent to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s 35.7 percent, according to results from 87 percent of polling places.
But the Federal Electoral Institute stressed those results weren’t final — and said it wouldn’t declare a victor until an official count due to start Wednesday.
Michael Barone pronounces the election ‘electrifying’, and says it is a triumph of Mexico’s electoral reforms, resulting in a more reliable voting process than its giant neighbor to the north:
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. All this is the legacy of PRI Presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, who calculated that Mexico could not take its place among advanced nations without a transparent and fair electoral system. They deserve great credit for the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another in Mexico in 2000, and for what appears likely to be the resolution of an extremely close fair election in 2006.
Barone also accurately pinpoints the danger of any close election: that the left, when it loses, inevitably cries foul:
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).
Progressive paranoia, in other words, isn’t confined to a geographic area…
I have always had a hard time with the democratic claims that they are worried about fraud/stolen elections, but when the time comes for simply asking for ID, they balk.
It is like they know something…otherwise they would be screaming for identification. Their rxn to the purple fingers in Iraq, seemed to have held excessive malice-as if it was unimportant(or even threatening) here.
They’re calling it Calderon.
It is a great victory. Beyond the pale of spin… but here goes.
I hope no one takes this as an endorsement relating to amercian politics, but both will try.
IF you look at the move towards leftist ideology in South and central america-(ie distribution of the wealth overseen by a group of elite)- the results are almost shocking. They have occurred in other latin american countries-victories and losses in this matter-but if there is a large enough middle class, that fears their own decline, they can bandy together and get, in this case, enough of the % to win.
It suggests a resilency that I would not have expected in Mexico-but also worry that the other two losers in Mexico were left and left-lite-suggesting that a move towards less government is just a blip and socialism is still the largest sail.