The votes were finally counted in Mexico's recent election, four days after the July 2 voting was finished, and the international business press has been able to declare the rightist candidate Felipe Calderon, of the George Bush-allied PAN party, the winner for the second time in just a few days. That's Mexican politics for you: with the right connections, you can win twice in the same election. And with any luck, they may get a chance to declare Calderon the winner one or two more times in the coming weeks and months, giving him a solid string of electoral victories before he even takes office.

The latest chapter in Mexico's transition to democracy (or something like it), opened on Sunday evening, July 2, as the first polls closed and the preliminary results were tallied by the IFE (the Federal Elections Institute), and broadcast to the nation and the world. Felipe Calderon was immediately posted a seven point lead over Lopez-Obrador, who had been given a slight lead in polls going into the race. As expected, Lopez-Obrador steadily closed the gap all evening, until the wee hours of Monday morning, when, as is not unknown in Mexican elections, strange things began to transpire. First, the count stopped completely for a time, just as Lopez-Obrador was about to close the gap with less than one percent between them. When it restarted, Calderon led, and continued to lead, by about one percent, and never fell below that number again, until the preliminary count was stopped completely later Monday morning. (The first installment of a series of articles describing the unfolding details of the electoral monkey business can be found at this link, by Al Giordano at http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article1962.html.)

The IFE had been expected to announce a projected winner on Sunday evening, but at the appointed time, declared the race too close to call until the votes were officially counted later in the week. But, based upon the apparently manipulated results of the IFE's preliminary count--that magical one percent lead--the corporate press announced Calderon had won the election. The White House rushed to congratulate Calderon on his "victory." Bush & Co. may have had a special pride in this election, as their Mexican proteges in the PAN appear to be emulating their own Florida.

Immediately, Mexico's main television networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, little more than a two-headed ventriloquist dummy for the ruling powers, began pounding on Lopez-Obrador to concede, declaring the stability of the country, if not democracy itself, was at stake. The PAN and their TV allies were forced to backtrack on Monday, with the revelation that Calderon's phony lead of some 377,000 votes relied upon the 2.5 million votes that had been included as "counted" when they had been set aside for "irregularities." Lopez-Obrador said the irregularities were in the IFE's behavior and claimed a state-sponsored fraud was in progress. He has demanded a vote-by-vote recount.

The official count, finished on July 8, gave Calderon a little over a half of one percent lead over Lopez-Obrador (.58 percent) and on the strength of this, the IFE has declared Calderon the winner. The results are not official until and unless the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) certifies them. In the meantime, Lopez-Obrador has rejected the decision of the IFE, and presented his evidence of fraud to the electoral tribunal. Lopez-Obrador and his millions of supporters are demanding a full, vote by vote recount, and swear they will reject any attempts to impose a president by fraud.

What happens next is anyone's guess. Lopez-Obrador can mobilize millions of supporters for demonstrations and direct actions. The PAN, Calderon's party, controls the federal government and, allied with one section of the PRI, the congress. The electoral tribunal is composed of members representing both the PAN and PRI, but, as part of a consistent pattern to deny Lopez-Obrador the presidency by whatever means, the PRD is shut out of that part of the process. That, and Mexico's history, suggests that the TEPJF will be a rubber stamp for electoral fraud, and Calderon will be anointed President (and Bush, and the international press can congratulate him one more time). On the other hand, Mexican history, and current opinion, also suggests a Calderon President widely seen as fraudulent will brew trouble--and a lot of it.

This seems to put Calderon and the PAN in a tight spot. After decades of complaining about the PRI's fraudulent elections, the PAN, with the Fox presidency, was heralded as establishing true democracy in Mexico. The IFE, forged out of the experience garnered over decades of electoral shenanigans of almost surreal proportions, was known as a professional and impartial organization, and has been held up as a sign of true democratic process, and more importantly, political stability. That's important especially for the PAN, which, dreaming of a First World Mexico, at least for a small elite able to afford it, needs that perception of national stability for its own continued stability. A questioned Calderon presidency promises to be anything but stable. How far they would be willing to trash Mexico's image as an increasingly democratic and stable country, merely to govern over an increasingly ungovernable nation, promises to be interesting, if not downright scary.

For his part, Lopez-Obrador appears to inspire a particular brand of fear among the country's elite that suggests that, like a mirror image to Calderon, Lopez-Obrador's attempts to govern, and more important, reform the government and economy, would face their own measure of disruption and refusal.

One persistent conjecture, which seems more plausible every day, is that the electoral tribunal will annul the elections and call new ones with an interim president installed in the meantime. In the rumor-filled atmosphere of Mexico's political system, there has been a stream of conjecture, even before the voting began, that annulling the elections, as a last ditch effort to keep Lopez-Obrador out of the Presidential office, was in the cards all along.