More on the Mexican Election
Yet no matter how the Tribunal ultimately rules, neither López Obrador nor Calderón will win the power he seeks. The real winners of the July 2 presidential election are the Televisa and Azteca television networks, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000, and Subcomandante Marcos, the leftist guerrilla turned pop culture icon.
Television was an obvious winner, and in Mexico TV means the twin behemoths Televisa and Azteca. The PAN spent $68 million for 70,000 commercial spots, about $4.50 for each of the 15 million votes Calderón received. The poorly capitalized Democratic Revolutionary Party, López Obrador's party, spent half Calderón and PAN's total for a nearly identical number of votes, while the PRI burned through $40 million for fewer than 10 million votes. Half the Mexican population lives on less than $10 a day. If the Mexican population remains evenly split between three competitive parties, the networks will continue to reap the benefits in coming elections.
The article discusses in more detail how the PRI has maintained sufficient legislative clout to force any winner to deal with them. Subcomandante Marcos’s TV career has a slight magic realism touch, along with a bit of the movie Network.. With the latter in mind, he’d better hope that his ratings don’t drop the next time he appears.
This article by George Grayson provides what seems to be a well-reasoned overview of the election, the results, and the immediate prospect. As best as I can tell from my surfing, Grayson is life-of-center, sympathetic to Obrador’s championing of Mexico’s dispossessed, but skeptical of Obrador’s ability to govern well even if he were somehow to win.
In my own transition from ill-informed to marginally informed on the issues in Mexico, this is what strikes me right now.
1. It’s something of a shame that Obrador has slammed Mexico’s electoral system. It’s never been better and according to some pretty respectable people, it could be used as a model for other nations.
2. The election really was close. As an Obrador representative noted
Just annulling two votes in the 130,000-plus ballot booths would be enough to alter the elections results, he said after recalling that Calderón’s advantage over him was a little more than 243,000 ballots in the Electoral Federal Institute (IFE) statistics.
That’s close. I shudder to think how many state electoral college battles we would be having over this margin.
3. The poor are still marginalized. No wonder so many are willing to go into the streets.