Felipe Calderon has officially won Mexico’s presidential election, an outcome that will be challenged in the courts by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and in the streets by his supporters.
The election has been a triumph for modernity and democracy. Calderon’s vision of Mexico’s future is a modern one: openness, more competition, and higher growth based on wealth creation. Lopez Obrador’s vision is based on backwardness: more government spending, protection of national industries, and arbitrary rule based on his own notion of “the will of the people.”
The election so far has been a victory for democracy, or perhaps better put, the rule of law. The electoral commission (IFE) has, by all independent accounts, run the elections with the utmost professionalism, transparency, and strict regard to election rules, thus making charges of fraud difficult to sustain. Luis Carlos Ugalde, the head of the IFE, is a sophisticated scholar and public servant and a student of public choice theory who understands well the dynamics of collective decisionmaking and the importance of the rule of law.
In large part because of the IFE’s performance, I expect that the electoral tribunal that will consider Lopez Obrador’s legal challenges will do so fairly and uphold the official outcome. The IFE’s performance and Lopez Obrador’s own antics will also influence the court of public opinion in a way that does not benefit the leftist candidate. Despite all its problems, Mexico really is more modern today than it was 10 or even six years ago. As Mary O’Grady notes in her Wall Street Journal column today, many Mexicans “have moved on” from the way things were done in the past. To add to Lopez Obrador’s difficulties, leading members of his own party, including rival leaders and those elected to governorships and congress, have little interest in seeing an annulment of the election results.
The other headline from the elections is the marginalization at the national level of the PRI party that monopolistically ruled Mexico for 71 years until Vicente Fox’s election in 2000. The PRI received only about 22 percent of the vote — an outcome that was unthinkable as recently as six years ago. The new political landscape — a divided congress reflecting a divided country — means that Calderon will not be able to easily push through the reforms he favors. But he appears to be more politically savvy than President Fox, so the expectations for a growth agenda that Fox promised but did not deliver are running high.
