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By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
Pretty much the entire week was the lead in for Sunday's presidential debate among the four candidates as the campaign visits stopped and candidates prepared.
Three of the four candidates have trailed Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) frontrunner Enrique Pena Nieto by double digits since last week, according to polling data supplied by Milenio news daily.
But not all was going swimmingly for Pena Nieto. There are signs that enthusiasm for his candidacy is starting to wane. A news article by El Imparcial news daily showed a photo of a Day of the Child rally April 30th in Distrito Federal where empty seats could be seen were inside the tent holding the campaign event. This is an area where enthusiasm for Pena Nieto should be the highest.
The caveat is that Sonora state, home of El Imparcial, is a Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) state with PAN governor Guillermo Padres Elias presiding, and is likely to accentuate travails by PRI politicians. Even so, the empty events with all the undecided voters should be a worrying trend for Pena Nieto.
PAN presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota ran into some difficulty as well during Day of the Child celebrations, when she tried to visit a children's hospital in Distrito Federal. A story in El Diario de Coahuila news daily related the complaints of a retired electrician where security concerns for Vazquez Mota's visit disrupted the hospital's normal functioning.
To the daily's credit, the retiree was identified as a member of the pro Partido Revolucion Democratica (PRD) Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (SME) or electrician's union. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's leftist coalition is headed up by the PRD.
A 12 minute scuffle broke out at Mexico City's Hotel Hilton Alameda where Lopez Obrador appeared at a campaign event on behalf of Miguel Angel Mancera, PRD candidate for president of Distrito Federal. Lopez Orbador was to give a talk about his redorm proposals concerning PEMEX, the Mexican government-owned oil company.
A man identifying himself as a reporter for a San Antonio,Texas media outlet, Rodolfo Macias, began screaming at Lopez Obrador, complaining about former PRI president Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
The reference to Salinas de Gortari is significant because he was elected president of the republic in 1988, the same year that then-PRI president of Tabasco state Lopez Orbador resigned to start the PRD.
Apparently the shouting match last 12 minutes as Lopez Obrador supporters tried to move Macias out of the event, when Lopez Obrador's bodyguards finally appeared.
Meanwhile, last Wednesday Vazquez Mota announced that according to internal polling she was within 10 percentage points of Pena Nieto, not 20 points as most polls were showing.
Vazquez Mota has a point. During the Michoacan gubernatorial elections, PAN president Gustavo Madero Munoz continued to tell media outlets that the polls were much, much closer than were actually reported, and as it turned out, while PAN failed to capture Michoacan, the margin of victory for PRI candidate Fausto Vallejo was about 42,000 votes, well below what PRI and its media allies had said at the time would be razor thin.
PAN politician and former finance minister under Mexican president Felipe Calderon, Ernesto Cordero gave a presentation last Wednesday that was tweeted by AnimalPolitico.com in which he put forth the case for PAN candidate Vazquez Mota and a return to Los Pinos for PAN.
Cordero's case rested primarily on economics. He told the audience of journalists that PRI's portrayal of PAN economic policies as hurting average Mexicans was not true.
For example, he told the gathering that the percentage of Mexicans in dire poverty went from 15 percent to five percent under PAN government. He also said that accumulated inflation in the 1980s under successive PRI administrations was 15,000 percent, while under PAN it was 55 percent. And as for reforms, he complained that PRI's strategy in the last two years has been to obstruct reforms in the PRI-controlled Chamber of Deputies for baldly political reasons, allowing PRI to claim lack of progress that they themselves were causing.
He also criticized PRI for its failure to deal effectively with criticism, stating that PAN deals with it as helpful advice to improving society, but PRI does not.
One reporter helpfully asked Cordero if he knew the prices of common items such as the costs of a ride on the Mexico City subway and of a kilogram of tortillas. Unlike the other three main candidate, he said he knew but would not tell the reporter.
That exchange impelled this writer to tweet Animal Politico if they had treated the PRI the same as Cordero and PAN. I did not get a reply.
Lastly, the time just prior to the debates, PAN received the news that spot ads linking PRI to disgraced former PRI president Humberto Moreria Valdes and his Coahuila state former tax collector and federal fugitive, Javier Villarreal Hernendez would not be permitted by the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE).
Instead, PAN politicians in Coahuila held at least one "mega-debt" rally to bring focus on the issue of massive debt contracted by states run by PRI governors, including Pena Nieto's home state of Mexico.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com.