Mr. Calderón, who will take office on December 1, had won a narrow plurality of votes in the fiercely fought July 2 election. But second-place finisher Andrés Manuel López Obrador has refused to accept the results, charging fraud and promoting civil unrest to force the tribunal to nullify the results. More than a few Mexican power-brokers have privately hoped for a similar outcome--which was all too imaginable in a country that only six years ago ended 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

So the conclusion of the seven-judge tribunal ought to be a moment of pride for Mexicans. It is a sign of political maturity that even such a close election can be fairly adjudicated. The tribunal had sponsored partial recounts in contested precincts, but in the end reduced Mr. Calderon's victory margin by only a few thousand votes. The result confirms the election-day judgment of foreign observers, who called the vote one of the cleanest they'd seen. Some one million Mexicans had voluntarily manned polling places on election day.

The challenge now is for all Mexicans to accept these results so that Mr. Calderón is able to govern. . . .

There's also a role here for the rest of the world, especially for U.S. political leaders who should be supporting Messrs. Fox and Calderón now that the tribunal has spoken. The special counsel for the Gore-Lieberman Recount Committee in 2000, Ronald Klain, was disgraceful on this score when he wrote in the July 9 Washington Post that Mr. López Obrador should "call his supporters to the streets and question the legitimacy of the vote casting and counting process. . . . Above all, he must reject any suggestion that Calderón received more votes--indeed, he must insist that any fair count would show that he is the rightful winner."

Mr. López Obrador seems to have taken that bad advice, at great potential cost to Mexican stability and democracy. It's time for Yankees who care about our southern neighbor to stop using Mexico 2006 as an excuse to settle scores from Florida 2000 and start reinforcing the vital institutions of Mexican democracy. The last thing the U.S. needs is an unstable, ungovernable Mexico.