The budget scheme revealed that the PRI and PRD will thwart any measures that might benefit Fox and the PAN’s presidential standard-bearer. Thus, Mexico’s next president will face the imperatives of energy, judicial, labor, and fiscal reform. The last of these is particularly salient because Mexico’s tax collections equal only 12.5 percent of GDP, just half the figure for Brazil, which is hardly a paragon of fiscal probity.

Impact of Fox’s Ineptness on the PAN

Fox’s PAN remains divided between the so-called Northern Barbarians and ortodoxos. Although Government Secretary Santiago Creel leads the field of contenders, he is a relative newcomer to the party. The traditionalists, who despair Fox’s ineffectiveness, want someone like Felipe Calderón, who at age 43 has already served as party youth leader, national president, Mexico City council member, deputy, gubernatorial candidate, and energy secretary. While he might edge out Creel for the nomination, he runs a distant third behind Madrazo and López Obrador in polling match-ups. Former Jalisco Governor Alberto Cárdenas could emerge as a compromise candidate, but Marta Sahagún will make the biggest splash if, as anticipated, she runs for mayor of Mexico City or the Senate.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party

After its setback in 2000, the PRI found itself without a chief executive to chart its course and exert discipline. In the absence of a commander-in-chief, militants fulminated against former President Ernesto Zedillo (1994 to 2000) and his fellow technocrats for allowing a PAN usurper to ascend to the apex of the political pyramid.

The back-biting continued as former Tabasco Governor Madrazo, a Tammany Hall-style político, squared off for the party presidency against a representative of progressives, technocrats, and Madrazo-haters. The wily Madrazo, who yearns to succeed Fox, narrowly won the intramural contest thanks to a deal with Elba Esther Gordillo. In return for activating her 1.2-million-member teachers’ union on his behalf, she became PRI Secretary-General with a view to succeeding the Tabascan as the party’s chief when he launches his presidential bid.

The indefatigable Madrazo began to barnstorm the country to revitalize the party’s machinery, insert his cadres in vital posts, and campaign for PRI candidates. On his watch, the party has captured a lion’s share of gubernatorial elections, while boosting its number of deputies from 208 to 223 at the expense of the PAN, whose legislative faction plummeted to 151. In the process, Madrazo alienated Gordillo to the point that she might form her own political party. She wants leverage to convince PRI mucky-mucks to jettison Madrazo in favor of Senate President Enrique Jackson or one of the party’s ambitious governors. If Madrazo winds up as the nominee, she could jump ship. Such a defection would further debilitate the PRI, which already has difficulty appealing to young people, independents, and middle-class professionals.

López Obrador and the PRD

For the past two years, López Obrador has headed the pack of presidential aspirants. While Fox raised citizens’ expectations, few expected much from Mexico City’s new executive. The capital had a reputation for “devouring” mayors because they confronted street crime, gridlock, pollution, corruption, joblessness, and a bloated bureaucracy.

In contrast to the floundering Fox, López Obrador attacked waste like a fundamentalist preacher reviling sin. As part of his zeal for “republican austerity,” he exposed the excesses of his predecessor, cut his salary and that of other high officials, and reduced bureaucrats’ access to cell phones, computers, credit cards, air travel, and city vehicles.

This belt-tightening, he claimed, enabled him to confer US$62 per month on senior citizens, the disabled, and single mothers who head households. He has also lavished scholarships on poor students, procured low-interest loans for small businesses, and opened the University of Mexico City, which admits students based on a lottery rather than entrance exams. In addition, he has courted the middle class by constructing new bridges and access roads, as well as second tiers on key arteries to speed traffic flows.

Furthermore, he convinced billionaire Carlos Slim, Mexico City’s Cardinal Archbishop, and the Fox administration to join the Federal District in restoring the rapidly decaying Historic Center where crumbling colonial buildings had become venues for prostitutes, drug dealers, and sleazy night clubs. He has rechristened the capital “the city of hope.”

He trumpets his successes in pre-dawn news conferences, known as mañaneros after the practice of early-morning love-making by peasants who are too exhausted for night-time intimacy. These well-attended daily sessions often allow López Obrador to set the agenda for the first news cycle, while responses to his controversial statements often dominate the afternoon cycle.

In addition, the mañaneros permit him to distinguish himself from other public figures. While they are sleeping, he is on the job. While they ride in fancy automobiles, he arrives at city hall in a medium-sized Japanese car. While they decorate their speeches with fancy phrases, he speaks in the idiom of the common man. While they adorn their wrists with Rolexes, he relies on a metal watch. While they make excuses for the infighting that rages within their parties or the paralysis besetting Congress, he announces generous programs for poor and working-class families. The upshot is that López Obrador projects the image of a “poor Christ,” who renounces material comforts to pursue his vocation of service.

Until early last year, López Obrador enjoyed a double-digit lead over Madrazo, Creel, and other presidential wannabes. Then the first “Video Scandal” erupted, featuring the city’s finance secretary losing large sums at a posh Las Vegas casino. The mayor immediately fired the official and swore that he knew nothing of his gambling addiction.

Next, a major TV network broadcast a video of an Argentine-born tycoon heaping fistfuls of cash on René Bejarano, the mayor’s ace political operative and head of the city council. Several other city officials were shown in equally compromising situations. Rather than concentrate on the apparent corruption, López Obrador self-righteously inveighed against Fox, Salinas, and other participants in a “conspiracy” to exterminate him and his ideas. He used the same argument when the attorney general moved to strip him of his political immunity—and bring him to trial—for allegedly defying a court order against building an access road to a hospital.