Mexican election 'too close to call'

About two thirds of eligible voters were expected to cast ballots. Picture / Reuters

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's presidential election is too close to call with a leftist anti-poverty crusader and the ruling party's conservative candidate locked in a tie, television exit polls have shown.

They showed Felipe Calderon of the ruling party and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing former mayor of Mexico City, were too close to declare a winner.

Lopez Obrador, 52, headed opinion polls by about only 2 points after almost six months of bruising campaigning that split a country still finding its feet with full democracy after seven decades of one-party rule ended in 2000.

The leftist promises to slash bureaucracy to pay for welfare programmes he says will lift millions out of poverty.

"Lopez Obrador is the only one who can bring a new Mexican revolution where the poor are the ones who win," said student Amalia Rodriguez, 19.

But former energy minister Calderon, 43, says Lopez Obrador would overspend on ambitious social programmes and huge projects like a bullet train from the capital to the US border.

"I'm afraid of the unknown with Lopez Obrador," housewife Enriqueta Navarro, 66, said in the capital's middle-class Satelite district. "I think he is going to be like a Chavez or a (Cuban President Fidel) Castro," she said.

Another candidate, Roberto Madrazo, lags in third place but his once long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has an electoral machinery famed for getting its supporters out to vote and he may do better than his poll numbers suggest.

The PRI handed out a sandwich and can of soft drink to poor indigenous voters in the town of Santiago Xalitzintla, next to the smoking Popocatepetl volcano.

Critics have long accused the PRI of trying to influence voters with food and small gifts.

Turnout was expected to be reasonably high, at about two-thirds of Mexico's 71 million voters.

Lopez Obrador supporters complain that President Vicente Fox's National Action Party failed to live up to promises to create jobs and alleviate poverty, even though Mexico has one of the region's most stable economies.

Fox cannot run for office again under Mexican law.

Lopez Obrador has won support by promising to give pensions to those over 70 and cut energy prices. He also wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to block tariff-free imports of US corn and beans.

Calderon is more in line with US views on politics and business. He would seek foreign investment in energy.

Voters will also choose a new Congress, where the next president is unlikely to have a majority.

- REUTERS