Mexico ~Aug 31, 2012
On Thursday, Mexico’s highest electoral tribunal rejected a lawsuit that sought the annulment of the July 1st election.
By MANUEL RUEDA
Mexico’s highest electoral tribunal has cleared the way for Enrique Peña Nieto to become the next President of Mexico, after rejecting a massive lawsuit filed by his main opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The lawsuit sought the annulment of the July 1st presidential election, which Peña Nieto won by 7 percentage points. In the complaint, López Obrador argued that Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] had committed numerous violations in the months leading up to the election, including buying millions of votes for its candidate and exceeding campaign spending limits. López Obrador’s legal team also said that the election had to be cancelled because biased polls and unfair media coverage gave the PRI an unfair advantage in July’s presidential contest.
On Thursday night, the seven judges sitting on Mexico’s Federal Electoral Tribunal [TEPJF] appeared on national TV to issue their sentence, and present their arguments for not cancelling the election.
One by one, they read out lengthy statements rejecting each of the complaints filed by López Obrador. Mostly, the complaints were rejected on the grounds that not enough evidence had been provided to prove things like excessive campaign expenditures. Judges also tended to reject the notion that opinion polls and the handing out of gifts had changed how people voted on election day.
Justice Manuel Gonzalez Oropeza, for example, spoke about claims that opinion polls had been manipulated prior to the elections to make Peña Nieto seem like the inevitable winner, and convince people to vote for this candidate.
“Complaints against opinion polls ignore the importance of the real elections, as well as the capacity of Mexicans to choose for themselves,” Oropeza said. “The leader in the polls did not end up getting more votes from undecided voters [on election day].”
The seven judge panel also found no “clear evidence” that the Televisa media group had favored PRI candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, or that in its TV channels it had systematically published polls that showed him as the front runner, with the intent of convincing people to vote for the PRI candidate.
While the PRI welcomed the decision, López Obrador vehemently rejected the TEPJF’s sentence, raising the question of whether he will call on his followers to launch massive protests such as those that occurred in 2006.
“The elections were not clean or authentic,” López Obrador said during a press conference on Friday morning, in which he announced a rally at Mexico City’s Zócalo square. “I am not going to recognize an illegitimate power that surges from vote buying and other grave violations to the constitution,” Obrador said of Mexico’s next government.
Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst, contrasted the TEPJF’s decision with a survey conducted in August by polling agency Covarrubias, which suggests that most people in Mexico think that Peña Nieto cheated in order to win the election.
Forty-seven percent of the respondents in the Covarrubias poll answered affirmatively to the question, “Do you believe that Peña Nieto cheated to win in the election?” while 37 percent said he didn’t cheat.
The same poll also asked people if they thought that Mexico’s Federal Electoral Tribunal would issue a fair sentence on the presidential election. Forty nine percent thought the tribunal would be “fair” while 37 percent said the tribunal would be “unfair.”
Meyer noted that the Covarrrubias poll interviewed subjects over the phone, so it may underrepresent the opinions of low-income Mexicans who lack regular access to phone services. Nevertheless, he said that the poll results indicated that the Mexican public “does not trust” in what the Electoral Tribunal and Mexican officials are saying about the July election.
“Some will accept the [election result] because they will want to move on with their lives, and they will say that this is how things have historically worked in Mexico,” Meyer said on the Radio Show MVS Noticias. “But there is a segment of the population that will not be in conformity. That part will have to shoulder the responsibility of purifying Mexican politics.”
(Photo: Manuel Rueda)
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