Americas

Americas

Mexican leftist scrubs clean image for 2012 election

18 November 2011 01:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Mexican presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is dropping his fiery left-wing rhetoric and instead preaching peace and love to win back voters alienated when he launched massive protests after narrowly losing the 2006 election, APA reports quoting Reuters.

Five years ago, Lopez Obrador shouted "To hell with the institutions!" at street rallies aimed at overturning his defeat against his conservative rival, President Felipe Calderon.

Now he is trying to re-brand himself as a friendly, warm leader ready to bury the hatchet with old foes.

His make-over bid and call for the creation of a "loving republic" echoes the attempts of other left-wing leaders in Latin America, like Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to tone down their hard-line images.

"We should strengthen values, love among families, love to others, love to the nation. That is crucial," the man commonly known by his initials AMLO said in a radio interview this week. "We reached the conclusion that we will only be happy if we are good."

Social media users and political commentators seized on his remarks and coined the phrase AMLOVE, which quickly became a top trend among Mexican users on microblogging site Twitter.

The about-face may not be enough to change his image in the minds of more moderate voters.

It also risks putting off hard-core supporters who have stuck by him over the last five years, when he used hundreds of visits to remote, poor towns across Mexico to push his claim that he is the "legitimate president"..

"He is trying to win back all those he kicked, bad-mouthed in the past. Now, his message is: ’I want to patch things up, I am good’," said image expert Marco Herrera, president of public relations firm Grupo Public. "But he is brewing a big credibility problem for himself."

To have any chance, Lopez Obrador will need to pull support away from the main centrist opposition party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has a big lead in opinion polls ahead of the July 2012 vote.

His aides say he has been to each of Mexico’s 2,440 municipalities twice since the last election, a campaign which has yielded fruit. This week he beat Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard in surveys among 6,000 supporters of left-wing parties to become their de facto candidate.

BURYING THE HATCHET?

Lopez Obrador has even tried to make up with Mexico’s top broadcaster Televisa, which he has many times denounced as part of a Mexican "mafia of power" and accused of bias toward the PRI’s presidential candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto.

"I don’t own the ultimate truth," Lopez Obrador told Televisa anchor Joaquin Lopez Doriga on Wednesday night. "I hope this is a new era with Televisa ... let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt."

Lopez Obrador is promising to bring the army back to barracks, reversing Calderon’s deployment of troops in a war against drug cartels that has killed more than 44,000 people in the last five years. He is also pledging to create jobs for disadvantaged youth to keep them off cartel payrolls.

Some analysts believe Lopez Obrador, who gained popularity as mayor of Mexico City with anti-poverty programs, could win votes from Calderon’s ruling National Action Party, or PAN, and the PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades until 2000.

"Disillusioned voters could opt for Lopez Obrador given disenchantment that the PRI has not changed and because of the PAN’s two erratic administrations," said Javier Oliva, an analyst from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

However, Lopez Obrador has a long way to go to close the gap. Polls show that he is the best-known of the candidates but that he also has the strongest negative ratings.

A head-to-head survey in daily Excelsior on October 31 showed Pena Nieto winning 55 percent of votes versus 26 percent for leading PAN hopeful Josefina Vazquez Mota, and just 19 percent for Lopez Obrador.

His make-over and his conciliatory stance toward Televisa have been greeted by some with disappointment.

"AMLO is a traitor .... he’s abandoned his principles," posted one Twitter user on Wednesday.

Others joked "All you need is AMLOVE".

Rodolfo de la Garza, a political scientist at Columbia University, said Lopez Obrador has no chance of winning the next election unless other candidates are embroiled in major corruption scandals or their campaigns collapse.

"The PRD ... acted so badly after the last election that the public became disenchanted," de la Garza said. "Maybe if the other candidates all die right before the election. There’s nothing realistic I can see."