After the vote, a troubling uncertainty.

last updated 8 January 2015

Mexico

And now we wait, said Mexico City’s El Universal in an editorial. Mexicans last week voted in record numbers in our presidential election, but we ended up with a stalemate. Election officials said that center-right candidate Felipe Calderon beat leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador—but only by a margin of 243,000 votes, out of more than 41 million ballots. López Obrador insists on a recount, alleging that fraud and miscounting robbed him of a win. It’s still uncertain whether he’ll get that recount, as the Federal Electoral Tribunal has until the end of August to rule on the fairness of the vote. In the meantime, we call on “all political actors” to show their respect for Mexicans by behaving “with restraint and calmness.”

It’s a bit late for that, said Ricardo Alemán, also in El Universal. López Obrador was not content to simply exercise his right to request a recount. He has resorted to “extralegal measures,” such as the release of videos that purport to show ballot boxes being stuffed. He even rallied his supporters for a huge, rowdy demonstration “denouncing the entire election as fraudulent.” Hundreds of thousands of them filled Mexico City’s central square, screaming and stamping. López Obrador refuses to let the democratic process work. And why? Because he knows that a recount will confirm that he lost. His rabble-rousing and grandstanding won’t change the outcome of the election. It merely serves to polarize Mexico.

If Mexico is bitterly split, Calderon bears his share of the blame, said Enriqueta Cabrera in Los Angeles’ La Opinion. The deep division between Mexico’s industrial north, which supports the capitalist policies of Calderon, and its poor and indigenous south, which supports the populism of López Obrador, is a simple “fact of life.” The polarization in politics, though, “is the responsibility of all the candidates, in particular Calderon.” He insisted on unfairly demonizing his opponent as a pro-communist demagogue in the style of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, as someone who would “use violence” to gain political ends.