Despite the headline for this article, "Mexico conservative creeps toward slim victory", this Reuters article is much fairer than the other one from the previous post.
I wonder if the 'conservative creeps' within that headline is completely accidental?
This article manages to mention the huge strides Calderon's party made in the two chambers of legislature. PAN kicked ass, I think that's the best way to put it.
Calderon will be in a far better position to institute reforms from a legislative perspective than Fox ever was.
Fox's desire and ability to reform Mexico was hampered by PRI hold outs within the legislative branch. They lost big in this election, they are now a distant third, behind even the lefty PRD, though they will have the power of being a spoiler still, given that PAN didn't win a majority, merely a very strong plurality.
But that's enough Mexican politics for 4th of July, it's not like it's their Independence Day today.
One last thing about the Mexican election. I think gender politics played a major role in the Calderon victory. The far out left candidate of the Alternativa party was a woman, Patricia Mercado , and she received over a million votes, the margin of victory for Calderon was much less than 1Million, and I think many women (and many only has to be 500,000 out of 20 million or so female voters) may have voted for the 4th party candidate solely because of her gender. They still have a very gendered and chauvanistic culture in Mexico, and I would imagine in the privacy of the voting booth a vote for the female candidate might have felt like a small act of subversion to screw with the patriarchy. I'm also speculating that the women most attracted to do this would have also been Lopez Obrador voters instead, but again, it's all just idle speculation on my part.
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