Mexico Riveted by Early Skirmishes in ’06 Race

MEXICO CITY — This is what Mexico’s presidential campaign has come to: For three days this month, dozens of legislators climbed atop the speaker’s platform in the lower house of Congress and brought proceedings to a halt. In one widely televised scene, two congresswomen tried to grab a microphone from the speaker’s hands, then shoved a placard in his face.

The rowdy lawmakers are backers of the leading presidential hopeful, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and they were vainly resisting a move to slash $398 million from his budget.

It was the latest escalation of a feud between the leftist mayor and lame-duck President Vicente Fox -- waged with acts of Congress, court orders, wiretaps and defiant rallies in the streets.

The contest between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry looks polite by comparison. And Mexico’s presidential election is not until July 2006.

Mexicans say their fledgling democracy is facing its biggest test since Fox won the country’s first fair presidential vote four years ago. They worry about the legitimacy of the next election if Fox, in the tradition of his autocratic predecessors, tries to influence the choice of a successor by keeping the mayor off the ballot.

The question is whether Lopez Obrador will be on trial and thus ineligible to run. At the request of Fox’s attorney general, Congress is debating whether to strip Lopez Obrador of his immunity as an elected official so he can face a criminal contempt charge for defying a court order to halt a road-building project on expropriated land.

Fox, striking a hands-off pose, insists the legal process must run its course. The 50-year-old mayor, without disputing the criminal charge, depicts himself as the victim of a government plot and warns of “civil resistance” if he is barred from the ballot. He recently turned out more than 120,000 supporters to march in his defense. “If they take away his immunity, we are capable of anything, including force, if necessary,” said Jose Ochoa, 57, a street vendor at the rally.

The two antagonists met last month but failed to settle their differences. Afterward, Fox called the mayor a liar; Lopez Obrador said the president cannot be trusted. The mayor was irritated that Interior Minister Santiago Creel, a presidential hopeful from Fox’s conservative National Action Party, sat in on the meeting. Creel had told the mayor to stop whining and to face his legal travails like “a little man.”

Mexicans are transfixed.

During the 71 years before Fox’s electoral upset in 2000, presidents in effect named their successors every six years within the all-powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The politicking leading up to that choice could be vicious, but most of it was hidden from public view.

Now presidential politics are pluralist, bitterly divisive and out in the open. It makes excellent theater, and Mexicans find it entertaining -- up to a point. Some express alarm that the high-level clash could undermine the consolidation of democracy, one of Fox’s few achievements in an otherwise disappointing term.

“The country is trapped by its ‘little men,’ ” political columnist Denise Dresser lamented in the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma. “Our democracy is tied down by its Lilliputians. The democratic transition is on the verge of being betrayed by politicians who stand 6 inches tall.”

Fox actually stands 6 foot 6 in his cowboy boots, but the once-charismatic president looks diminished by the scramble to succeed him. The field of a dozen or so declared and undeclared candidates included his wife until the cries of nepotism became so shrill that he coaxed her to rule herself out.

The opposition-led Congress, which has blocked Fox’s most important initiatives, is little more than a forum for partisan strife. Opposition lawmakers last month repeatedly jeered his state-of-the-union speech -- even his call for a truce. The legislative agenda is so light these days that one congressman found time to appear on Mexico’s version of the reality TV show “Big Brother.” According to polls, 80% of Mexicans take a dim view of Congress.

Lopez Obrador, by contrast, has approval ratings exceeding 70% in the city and 60% nationwide. He hands out $60 a month to Mexico City’s elderly poor, builds double-decker freeways for its middle-class commuters and taps rich entrepreneurs to help restore its historic center. He lives modestly and rises early, using his daily 6:15 a.m. press briefing to dominate headlines.

His resume and slick self-portrayal as a champion of the poor help explain why the mayor remains the most popular presidential candidate despite a series of corruption scandals and legal assaults that have recently rocked his administration.

Many predicted that Lopez Obrador’s candidacy would crumble in March after hidden video cameras recorded one of his political operatives stuffing his pockets with apparent bribe money, and his finance minister playing $300-a-hand blackjack in Las Vegas.

The video scandal, played out on national TV, tore the mayor’s Democratic Revolution Party, the PRD, apart. It also provided new evidence that the capital is bled by graft and so indebted that it can barely meet its payroll. But Lopez Obrador suffered only a temporary drop in opinion polls, mainly because of an astute defense: The businessman who leaked the tapes, the mayor said, was motivated by anger over the city’s refusal to pay him and other contractors deemed by the mayor to be corrupt.

In May, when the scandal had run its course, the mayor received his contempt-of-court summons. He came back with a defense that sounds reasonable only in a country like Mexico, where the rule of law is so weak: A lot of other public officials ignore court orders and get away with it, he argued, so why can’t I?

A congressional vote on taking away his immunity has been put off until next year and might not succeed after all. Roberto Madrazo, the PRI leader and its presumed presidential candidate, said last week that his party does not care whether the mayor is on the ballot. “We are going to win with the votes of the citizens,” he said.

Madrazo has his work cut out for him. In Reforma’s latest poll on presidential hopefuls, the mayor had 31% of voters behind him, well ahead of Madrazo and Creel, who were tied at 20%.

“The longer this attack [on Lopez Obrador] continues, the stronger it makes him,” said Daniel Lund of the MUND Americas polling firm. “He has used it to project himself more strongly as a national figure.”