Mexico & Nafta - November 2006 ( ISSN 1741-444X)

As the opinion polls predicted, César Raúl Ojeda Zubieta, Andrés Manuel López Obrador's candidate for governor of Tabasco elections, lost heavily in the election on 15 October. The apparently comprehensive result and the peacefulness of polling day suggest that Ojeda's and López Obrador's protests against the result will not be upheld. López Obrador and his supporters in the Por El Bien de Todos coalition claim that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) bribed people to vote for its candidate, Andrés Granier.

The official result of the election was 440,250 votes for Granier against 358,492 for Ojeda. Granier said, on 22 October, that he would incorporate perredistas in his government. The PRI also won 10 of the state's 27 municipalities, which also held elections. The Por el Bien de Todos coalition won the other seven. López Obrador's Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) alleged on 4 October that the PRI had stockpiled bicycles to bribe voters in the forthcoming election in Tabasco. The president of the PRI in Tabasco, Georgina Trujillo, admitted that the party had been giving out "humanitarian assistance" but denied that the gifts were electoral bribes. 

The PRD and López Obrador's Por el Bien de Todos alliance, realised well before polling day that they were fighting an uphill battle in Tabasco. On 2 October, López Obrador admitted that the campaign was underfunded, but he claimed that support for Ojeda was rising and that he was now ahead. On 5 October, the local electoral commission ordered the PRD to withdraw TV ads attacking Granier. The decisiveness of Ojeda's victory, by nine percentage points according to the official results (though the exit polls showed a 16 percentage point margin), shows how far López Obrador's support has fallen since his narrow defeat in the July presidential election. Tabasco is López Obrador's home state and was a bastion. In Tabasco in July López Obrador won 512,743 votes in the presidential election, well above the number cast for the PRI presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo (344, 526) and for the (now president-elect) Felipe Calderón Hinojosa who won barely 32,000.

The scale of the defeat in Tabasco means that López Obrador cannot afford his next political move, his self-inauguration on 20 November, to misfire. López Obrador needs crowds of supporters if his campaign against the President-elect Felipe Calderón, is not to degenerate into self-indulgent pique. Already elements in López Obrador's Partido de la Revolución Democrática are signalling that they are prepared to negotiate with Calderón and his team.