In case it escaped your notice, Mexico just held a presidential election. A lot may have been riding on the outcome. If the National Action Party wins, it seems likely that Mexico will continue on the path of rational reform. If the Democratic Revolutionary Party has won, it will be interpreted as a sign that the irrational left wing populism championed by Hugo Chavez in Venesuala has swept up another Latin American nation. According to Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the Wall Street Journal, the news is good.
Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party hasn't any doubt that he won Sunday's presidential election, and he says that his adversary, Andres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), knows it, too. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at his campaign headquarters yesterday, Mr. Calderón appeared rested and confident. "I'm not going to get into personalities," he told me, "but all the parties have copies of the tally sheets showing the voting, and the PRD knows that it lost."
Mr. Calderón's numbers jibe with those of Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) and it seems almost certain that he won. But as we go to press, an official announcement has not yet been made. A preliminary ruling is scheduled for today, with the official decision to come on Friday. And even then the country may be in for weeks of the Mexican equivalent of challenges to hanging chads.
The big victory in this race goes to the IFE in carrying out a spectacularly clean, transparent and well-organized election. If institutions matter to development, as Nobel laureate Douglass North contends, then Mexico is well on the way to progress. Mr. Calderón echoed the sentiments of millions of Mexicans when he told me yesterday that watching the electoral process made him "proud to be a Mexican." Mexico's next test will be how it stands up to Mr. López Obrador's threat to call street protests if the IFE decision goes against him.
Americans were briefly reminded by the electile dysfunction of 2000 how wonderful it is to have elections that are over within hours of the closing of the last polls. As O'Grady notes, the real test will be whether the losing party accepts its loss, or takes to the streets. Manuel Roig-Franzia, writing in the Washington Post has this:
On Tuesday, López Obrador's campaign demanded a ballot-by-ballot recount. And Emilio Serrano, a federal legislator from the candidate's Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, said in an interview that violence is possible if the vote-tampering allegations are proven.
"We are not afraid to die in the fight," Serrano said. "We in the public are tired of the lies and the abuses, which have been demonstrated over the length of our history."
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