Or so he hopes. Calderón received less than 36 percent of the ballots cast in the presidential election and the PAN’s slate of congressional candidates failed to gain a majority in either house. To rule effectively he’ll need to forge a coalition government before taking office in December, and he won’t get a helping hand from López Obrador. The nominee of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution dismissed the electoral court’s ruling as “a political decision” and vowed to set up a parallel government in the coming weeks. That leaves the once omnipotent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years but garnered a mere 22 percent of the votes, along with three smaller left-of-center groups. “I want to make agreements with other parties in the opposition to get a majority,” Calderón told NEWSWEEK in June. “I am willing to share the program of the government and the cabinet.”
At first blush the PRI would seem an unlikely partner in a Calderón-led government. The center-right PAN was the PRI’s only credible opposition throughout most of its decades in power, and the PRI’s congressional caucus hamstrung most of outgoing President Vicente Fox’s reform legislation throughout his six-year term in office. But the PRI’s dismal performance in this year’s election may have humbled its leadership, and Calderón met separately with three of its state governors last month. Prospects for cooperation between the once bitter rivals received a boost last week when PRI and PAN congressmen teamed up to elect a new speaker of the lower house over the objections of López Obrador’s allies. Some pundits remain doubtful, however. “A real coalition government with a partner that votes with Calderón all the time is very unlikely,” says newspaper columnist Sergio Sarmiento. “The PRI and PAN will have some grounds for working jointly on matters like labor legislation and fiscal reforms, but whatever agreements they reach will vanish the closer we get to midterm elections in 2009.”
Still, Felipe Calderón has made a career out of proving the skeptics wrong. They sneered two years ago when Calderón, then serving as Energy secretary, announced he would seek the PAN’s presidential nomination for 2006 even though another cabinet minister already enjoyed Fox’s blessing. They scoffed last spring when he began running TV ads branding the then front-running López Obrador as “a danger to Mexico” who did not respect the rule of law. The ads helped him turn a deficit of between 6 and 10 percentage points in the polls into what appears to be a victory.
Calderón’s thin, recently published autobiography is called “The Disobedient Son,” a title, he says, that was partly inspired by a popular Mexican folk song of the same name whose protagonist is named Felipe. Others say the title is meant to highlight Calderón’s supposedly premature announcement of his presidential ambitions in 2004, a move that angered Fox at the time. But Calderón in reality is anything but a rebel. He was practically born into the PAN as the fifth child of one of the party’s founding fathers. He headed the PAN’s youth wing for a time and met his wife, Margarita, when he was teaching at a party-sponsored research institute. Calderón went to all the right schools, obtaining his bachelor’s degree from a top law faculty in Mexico City and a master’s in public administration from Harvard. He was a month shy of his 29th birthday when he was elected to his first term in Congress, became the party’s youngest president ever five years later and returned to the Chamber of Deputies in 2000.
A balding, bespectacled father of three who makes up in perseverance what he demonstrably lacks in charisma, Calderón cuts a stark contrast with the imposing, plain-spoken Fox. If anything, Calderón evokes the bland, Ivy League-educated technocrats who ruled Mexico during the last two decades of the PRI’s reign. And indeed, he is a faithful disciple of the free-market policies they introduced in the 1980s and 1990s and which Fox later championed as president. On the campaign trail Calderón echoed López Obrador’s talk of creating more jobs, but he steered clear of his opponent’s pledge to review certain clauses in the 12-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that threaten Mexico’s small farmers. “The world is interconnected … and I want Mexico to be prepared,” asserted Calderón in one of his stump speeches. “It isn’t true that the process of globalization will be reversed. It is here to stay.”
The Calderón campaign’s top international-affairs adviser, however, does foresee a subtle shift in the country’s relationship with its neighbor to the north. Rebuilding Mexico’s neglected ties with Latin America will be a key priority in a Calderón administration, says career diplomat Arturo Sarukhan, and immigration will no longer be the one issue dominating U.S.-Mexican relations. “Every-thing was subservient to that issue,” notes Sarukhan. “[Immigration] will become one of four wheels on the cart, along with border security, regional development within Mexico and [expanding] NAFTA.”
One thing seems certain: Washington will enjoy a higher comfort level with an English-speaking Harvard graduate like Calderón than his rabble-rousing foe who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, still thinks he should be the next president. López Obrador’s heavy-handed pressure tactics have alienated millions of his onetime supporters. Late last week congressmen from López Obrador’s party physically blocked Fox from delivering his final State of the Union address. The leftist politician is still planning to hold his own convention on Sept. 16, Mexico’s Independence Day, meant to crown him president-elect. Mexico’s self-styled disobedient son may have his hands full with a genuine rebel.
