What a relief. Mexico's top electoral court has finally put an end to a bitterly contested presidential election by ratifying the victory of pro-business conservative Felipe Calderón over left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The final vote count put Calderón's margin of victory at a mere 233,831 votes out of 41.5 million ballots cast. Clearly, this was a hard-earned victory, and the 44-year-old lawyer with a background in economics deserves to savor his accomplishment – just as long as he does it quickly. There is much work to do, and no time to waste in doing it.
Oh, there are the usual tasks that any president of Mexico would be expected to undertake. Calderón spelled them out in his first address to the nation as president-elect: combatting poverty, ending inequality, fighting crime, providing jobs, and all the rest. Calderón has to take a swipe at all that, just as any president would.
But first, Calderón has a special mission to complete, and if he doesn't pull it off, he won't have any hope of accomplishing anything else. He has to take what is essentially a broken country and put it back together. He has to unify the Mexican people by stretching beyond his base in the middle class and the well-to-do and reaching out to the millions of poor people who threw their support behind López Obrador.
This won't be easy with many of those people still intent on standing by their man, and with López Obrador himself refusing to recognize Calderon's victory and vowing to set up a parallel government. It's outrageous behavior that only serves to prove that Mexican voters had the right idea in denying this egomaniac the presidency.
But the man is easier to dismiss than the reasons for his appeal. There is a current of discontent in Mexico. And rightly so. People are fed up with generations of incompetence and corruption. Let's not forget that there are still protesters camped out throughout Mexico City and occasionally tangling with police. Winning over these true believers may be impossible.
Luckily for Calderón, there are others. There seem to be many people who voted for López Obrador in the July 2 election but have since come to their senses. They are up for grabs, and it is up to Calderón to make a credible pitch for their support by showing them that their concerns are his concerns.
Of course, the new president-elect is not likely to have much luck trying to win over legislators in López Obrador's Democratic Revolution Party. Last week, in a moment of high drama, about 150 PRD legislators in Congress prevented the president, Vicente Fox, from delivering his final state of the nation address. Now many of them have vowed to disrupt Calderón's inauguration on Dec. 1.
The election is over, and the president has been named. But the wounds are still open. It's up to the victor to do everything he can to stop the bleeding. At this point, it's the only agenda item that counts.
