While Lopez Obrador gained national prominence as an outsider challenging the system, the PAN’s 2006 presidential candidate began life as a political insider. His father was Luis Calderon Vega, an early PAN leader. The younger Calderon spent his childhood in a highly politicized environment, handing out leaflets and painting political signs on walls—the main form of political discourse before television—to promote PAN candidates. With years of activism under his belt, he formally joined the PAN in 1980—at age eighteen.
In 1987, Calderon graduated from Mexico City’s Escuela Libre de Derecho with a law degree. He later received a Master’s in economics from the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) and another Master’s in public administration from the JFK School of Government at Harvard.
At age nineteen, Calderon faced his first political crisis when his father resigned from the PAN to protest its having fallen under the influence of businessmen and its accepting campaign financing from the federal government—funds that Calderon pere felt would compromise the party’s independence. At the time, the younger Calderon decided not to follow his father, but rather to remain in the party and “take it back” from the outsiders.10
After his father’s resignation from the PAN, Calderon came under the influence of Carlos Castillo Peraza, whom he described as his mentor. This mentor, who is considered the last intellectual to head the PAN, sought to inculcate traditional PAN values in the many new party members who had shifted from business to politics. Castillo Peraza, who was serving as PAN president, appointed Calderon as PAN secretary general in 1993. Two years later, Calderon ran for governor in his native Michoacan, a PRD stronghold. The 25 percent of the vote he received was 14 percent above the vote the previous PAN gubernatorial candidate had received.11
At thirty-three, Calderon became the PAN’s youngest president ever after winning the party’s internal election with the slogan, “Take power without losing the party.” This slogan challenged the willingness of many to shed the party’s original principles in an attempt to win elections. Calderon benefited from his having Castillo Peraza’s support and from his having served previously as PAN youth director.12
As party president, 1996—1999, Calderon began to attract national attention. In 1996, he played a major role in drafting the political reform legislation that would allow Fox to take the presidency in 2000. In contrast to Lopez Obrador, he supported the bank bailout known as FOBAPROA because he felt it vital to Mexico’s economic health. Calderon also oversaw the continued expansion of the party, as the PAN won gubernatorial races in Aguascalientes, Nuevo Leon, and Queretaro.13
From 2000 to 2003, Calderon served as the PAN coordinator in the Chamber of Deputies. He failed to make much of an impression there, simply because the Fox administration had few legislative victories. In 2003, President Fox appointed him as head of the government-owned Public Works Bank. This was correctly viewed as a lightweight position for someone obviously wanting to move up the political ladder. Calderon did not have to wait long for such an opportunity, since in September of that year Fox appointed him secretary of energy.
In May 2004, the governor of Jalisco organized a rally—which Calderon and some 3,000 others attended—to show the governor’s support for a Calderon presidential candidacy in 2006. Fox publicly reprimanded Calderon’s “imprudence” for plunging into presidential politics while still a cabinet member, especially since the election was two years in the future. Calderon immediately resigned his cabinet post, declaring he had been unjustly criticized. This resignation proved to be an astute political move, since it turned the spotlight on the still poorly known Calderon. The resignation also gave him something of a maverick image, which the quite bland politician needed. Leaving the cabinet also allowed him to distance himself from the underachieving Fox administration.14
His resignation allowed Calderon to tour Mexico full-time to seek the PAN presidential nomination. However, his absence from the cabinet kept him out of the limelight while his chief rival for the nomination, Santiago Creel, remained as secretary of the interior—a position that ensured constant media exposure.
For the 2006 presidential race, the PAN decided that it would hold a primary election to select its presidential candidate, rather than making the selection in a party convention, as it had in the past. However, unlike the PRD and PRI primaries, in which any registered voter could participate, the PAN restricted voting to its 200,000 members and 800,000 activists. This proved to be decisive for Calderon, since although he was not well known to the public at large, he enjoyed very high name recognition among his party’s faithful. The small size of the primary electorate enabled Calderon to effectively travel around the country promoting himself to PAN loyalists, without having to spend huge sums—which he lacked—to buy media. His message was simple— elect me to restore the party’s conservative, Catholic values.15
Calderon won the PAN presidential candidacy in a three-round primary (one round in each of three geographical areas) with 51.79 percent of the vote. Several factors enabled Calderon to overtake Creel, who had started his campaign with 62 percent support, compared to Calderon’s
8 percent. Calderon proved to be an effective campaigner, his deep roots in the party appealed to party stalwarts who were less than enthusiastic about Creel, who only joined the party in 1999, and he did well in a debate among those aspiring to the PAN nomination. Creel was hurt by one of his last acts as interior secretary, which was to grant 130 twenty-five-year gaming licenses to Apuestas Internacionales, a firm linked to Televisa. The deal smelled of favors in exchange for support from the dominant TV network. A final factor behind Calderon’s victory was that 70 percent of those eligible failed to vote, skewing the voting population to those sharing Calderon’s traditional party values. The burst of media attention surrounding his surprise victory over Creel gave Calderon a major boost in the polls and, for the first time, indicated that Lopez Obrador had a serious rival.16
World History
