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MEXICO: CANDIDATE LOSES, SWEARS HIMSELF IN November 21, 2006
Zainab Osman
(SomaliNet) The losing leftist candidate for president swore himself in on Monday as “the legitimate president of Mexico” before a huge crowd of his avid fans, ignoring rulings by federal electoral authorities and the courts that he narrowly lost the election last July.
The candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who took on Mexico’s entrenched oligarchy, chose the anniversary of the Mexican revolution for the event. He has continued to assert that his opponents used fraud to deny him victory.
About 100,000 people crowded into the square and roared with approval when a copy of the traditional green, white and red presidential banner was placed across his chest.
“We are assembled here to confront a fraudulent election,” he said, “and to take on a regime of corruption and privileges, to start the construction of a new republic.”
Mr. López Obrador maintains that powerful business leaders colluded with Mr. Fox’s party to mount a smear campaign depicting him as a dangerous leftist totalitarian. He also says Mr. Fox’s party made a pact with the centrist former governing party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, to defeat him in northern states.
Both accusations are true to a degree, but the nation’s highest electoral court ruled that those actions were not enough to skew the election results. Mr. Calderón, 44, a former energy minister, won by 240,000 votes.
Mr. López Obrador, who is 53, said he intended to have members of his Democratic Revolution Party introduce legislation in Congress, then use public pressure to force the laws through. Among his proposals are measures to break up near monopolies, improve health care, raise the minimum wage and cut government salaries. He said he intended to continue touring to promote his ideas.
It remained to be seen if Monday’s political theater was a graceful exit for a candidate who could never acknowledge defeat, or truly the start of a unified left-wing movement to challenge the oligarchy of politicians and business executives who have controlled the country for a century.