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Mexican Presidential Election Unlikely to Bring Radical Changes, Political Scientist Says

"The critical aspect of this election is not who wins, but whether the losing parties will accept the electoral result or will contest it by non-institutional means," says Guillermo Trejo

The closely watched Mexican presidential election next week will not likely shift the country dramatically to the right or to the left, says a Duke University political scientist who specializes in Mexican politics.

 

"The critical aspect of this election is not who wins, but whether the losing parties will accept the electoral result or will contest it by non-institutional means," said Guillermo Trejo, an assistant professor of political science.

 

Mexico became a democratic regime in 2000, after 71 years of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The July 2 election is the first presidential election under the new system.

 

Most public opinion surveys report a tight race between Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, and Felipe Calderon of the ruling center-right National Action Party, or PAN. The PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo has consistently trailed throughout the race.

 

With 40 percent of voters claiming to be independent, the election could be decided by PRI defectors or by swing voters, said Trejo, whose research focuses on electoral competition, social protest and armed rebellions in Mexico and Latin America. Before joining Duke, he taught for five years at CIDE, a top social science institution in Mexico City.

He says AMLO, who has portrayed himself as a champion of the poor, has been at the center of the campaign, so the election could be interpreted as a referendum on him.

 

"Some analysts on Wall Street and in Washington remain skeptical about the institutional capacity of Mexico's new democracy to restrain a charismatic and 'populist' leader like AMLO," Trejo said.

 

"'Will AMLO be the next Chavez?' they ask," he added. "No. AMLO is not Chavez because Mexico is not Venezuela. And the key difference is the strength of each country's political institutions. Chavez emerged from of the ashes of Venezuela's party system. But an AMLO, or a Calderon, government will be under the permanent check of a strong party system."

 

No matter which candidate wins, Trejo said, he will not have a majority in congress or the senate.

 

"This is the hard fact of the election: Neither Calderon nor Lopez Obrador will be able to single-handedly reform the constitution and embrace radical populist or market-oriented policies simply because neither will have the legislative majorities to undertake such changes," he said.