Mexico steps back from brink in election crisis

MEXICO CITY - For weeks, angry leftist protesters blockaded foreign banks, old class and race hatreds resurfaced and riot police were deployed around Congress.

Mexico stared into an abyss after July's contested presidential election but it has stepped back from serious political unrest and now President-elect Felipe Calderon has a good chance of imposing his will on Congress.

Losing leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador last weekend ended a sit-in by supporters claiming election fraud that had crippled central Mexico City for over six weeks.

Leftist protests have died out since an electoral court threw out Lopez Obrador's claims of vote rigging and named Calderon winner by less than a percentage point of one of the most hotly contested elections in Mexico's history.

Although leftists will launch new demonstrations against Calderon, who takes office on December 1, Mexico appears to have turned away from the violence that many feared.

"We don't believe a conflict is inevitable. In fact, it is more remote now than on other occasions," Juan Camilo Mourino, the head of Calderon's transition team, said on Tuesday night.

In a symbolic move, Lopez Obrador supporters last Saturday declared the leftist Mexico's "legitimate president" at an open-air convention, and decided against escalating street protests that some feared could lead to violence.

He plans to travel around Mexico promoting his anti-poverty message but some on the left have begun to criticise his fiery rhetoric and he may struggle to stay relevant once Calderon takes office.

"Lopez Obrador's movement will disintegrate. He had good intentions but there's something of the (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chavez about him which unfortunately distances many people in the movement," leftist Mexican author Carlos Fuentes told a Spanish newspaper this week.

But Lopez Obrador still has a large following and will make life uncomfortable for pro-US former energy minister Calderon at least in the coming months.

Lawmakers from his Party of the Democratic Revolution plan to prevent Calderon taking office at a ceremony in Congress in December. Mass street protests are expected.

Hundreds of riot police had to seal off Congress late last month when protesters tried to blockade it, and they may need to be deployed again for Calderon's swearing in.

"Where I think there is a big risk is December 1. That is where things could get tense and the country might go though difficult moments," said senator Francisco Labastida, ex-candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, who lost the last presidential election in 2000 to President Vicente Fox.

If he can bear the leftist sniping, Calderon will be in a better position than Fox to push fiscal, labour and energy reforms sought by Wall Street through Congress.

His National Action Party is the biggest party in the 500-seat lower chamber of deputies and may receive support from PRI lawmakers.

"We have 206 deputies. We need only 45 deputies from any of the political forces to obtain a majority to be able to do certain things," Mourino said.

The election campaign, Mexico's first since the 2000 vote ended seven decades of often-authoritarian PRI rule, was a dirty fight. Harsh rhetoric pitted Calderon's mostly richer supporters against poorer, often indigenous voters who backed Lopez Obrador.

Calderon inherits a divided country and wounds could take years to heal, said Guadalupe Loaeza, a socialite and newspaper columnist who was harshly criticised by her wealthy peers for backing Lopez Obrador.

"The polarisation that was created, not just in society but even in families, was horrible," she said. "Just today I answered 30 emails calling me crazy for supporting a madman like that."

- REUTERS