Mexico’s presidential campaign ended on Wednesday with a fiesta of rallies, as establishment candidates made last-ditch pleas for voters to reject the radical break with the past promised by leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, widely known as “ALMO.”
All four candidates held a series of huge rallies around the nation — none more festive than Lopez Obrador’s in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium, where an A-list of Mexican musicians performed before his speech.
With his anti-corruption platform, the fiery former Mexico City mayor looks virtually unstoppable heading into Sunday’s vote.
Photo: AFP
Opinion polls have given him a double-digit lead for months. Two polls released on Wednesday — the final day for campaigning and polls — put his advantage at more than 20 points.
Sick of endemic corruption and horrific violence fueled by the nation’s powerful drug cartels, many Mexicans are keen for any alternative to the two parties that have governed for nearly a century: the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
“The policies we’ve been applying for the past 30 years haven’t worked. We haven’t even had economic growth,” Lopez Obrador told thousands of cheering supporters as he wrapped up his campaign. “What’s grown is corruption, poverty, crime and violence. That’s why we’re going to send their policies to the dustbin of history.”
Such attacks have left Lopez Obrador’s rivals scrambling to distance themselves from their parties’ legacies, while also warning that Lopez Obrador’s ideas are dangerous.
Judging by the opinion polls, the PRI and PAN candidates — former Mexican secretary of finance Jose Antonio Meade and former congressional speaker Ricardo Anaya respectively — are having a hard time selling that message.
Both were holding out hope they would manage to unite the anti-AMLO vote and win.
“Our coalition is the only one that can beat Lopez Obrador,” Anaya said at his final rally in Leon. “I’m calling on all good people, including those in other parties, those with no party... I am explicitly calling on you to cast a pragmatic vote.”
“The silent majority will win us this election,” Meade said.
Lopez Obrador has clashed with Mexico’s business community, with some saying he might pursue Venezuela-style socialist policies that could wreck Latin America’s second-largest economy.
Seeking to soothe the markets, he has backpedaled on some of his most controversial proposals.
Instead of reversing Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s landmark energy reform, he now proposes simply reviewing the existing contracts privatizing the oil sector, and he has remained vague on a proposed amnesty for criminals, his idea to deal with violence that saw a record 25,000 murders last year.
Many of Mexico’s 88 million voters are not sure what Lopez Obrador represents other than something new, but in these elections, that might be enough.
“Who cares if they say he’s going to do a bad job running the country? These other politicians have experience, they speak who knows how many languages, and look where that got us. They robbed us, they’re corrupt,” said Teresa Rivera, 68, a maid who had been standing in line since 5am to see Lopez Obrador’s evening rally.
Mexico’s next president faces a laundry list of challenges, including crime, corruption, a lackluster economy and a complicated relationship with the US under US President Donald Trump, whose anti-trade and anti-immigration policies have turned diplomacy with Mexico’s largest trading partner into a minefield.
Lopez Obrador has vowed to “put [Trump] in his place.”
Ironically, some commentators have drawn parallels between the two: Both are free-trade skeptics who have fired up a disgruntled base with anti-establishment campaigns.
However, unlike Trump, Lopez Obrador has built an image as an ascetic everyman.
“I’m going to halve the presidential salary and continue living in my own house,” he said in a widely circulated campaign video. “I’m going to govern by example, with austerity.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not