Vicente Fox Quesada has given his victory speech based on two sets of exits polls which give Fox a comfortable lead. Today, which also happens to be his birthday, everyone is expecting tomorrow's official results to confirm that Vicente Fox has been elected the president of the largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world. Major contenders were Fransisco Labastida (PRI) of the ruling party and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano (PRD).
The campaign has been marked with brash behavior from both major candidates. There have been accusations of corruption from both Labastida and Fox, as well as personal insults and challenging one other's sense of family and manhood. It almost seemed as if Fox's early victory speech was meant to get one last jab in. Regardless of all of the campaign antics, this has also been the fairest democratic election with the nation's electoral agency finally out of the control of the PRI party and hundreds of observers all over the country.
TV Azteca exit polls showed Fox with 38.8%, Francisco Labastida with 30.5%, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas with 15.7%. Televisa, another network, gave Fox 44%, Labastida 38%, and Cardenas 16%. The Federal Electoral Institute's (IFE) earliest official results gave Fox 49.7%, Labastida 31.9% and Cardenas 13.6%. With this information Fox supporters took to the streets and the candidate himself announce the results to his waiting public. The preliminary IFE results give Fox 42.71%% and Labastida 35.78%. The official counts are due to be released sometime Wednesday. One part of a quieter debate is about the large difference between the polls before the election and the actual result. Pre-election polls had the candidates in a statistical dead-heat.
Vicente Fox Quesada has a Business degree and worked his way from a Coca-Cola Mexico truck driver to President of Coca-Cola's Latina American operations. Fox is divorced from his wife and has four adopted children. He was elected governor of Guanajuato in 1991 and re-elected again in 1994. He is scheduled to be inaugerated on December 1 of this year.
Fox's promises to the country start with a cabinet made up of incumbents from the PRI's rule and new faces from PAN. He also has dedicated himself to expanding the education and scholarship budget as well as the general economy of Mexico. Many of his policies take special notice of the indigenous and rural population, although the PRI had tried to turn this population against Fox. He has repeatedly accused the United States method of "certifying" Mexico's effort against drug trafficking as promoting ineffective methods and lacking in commitment. His proposal is to create a full-time panel that addresses the problem throughout the year, instead of the rushed efforts crammed into the month before certification takes place. Another proposal will test the commitment of the United States to helping the Mexican economy expand. Fox suggests creating open work traffic across the border in the same way that we share products and services. With NAFTA in place and immigrants flooding the U.S., the economy of the United States has still been growing and unemployment is down. The arguments against this proposal would be largely xenophobic.
Now Fox has to worry about market reactions to the unseating of Mexico's party which has ruled for 71 years. Writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, once called the PRI's rule the "perfect dictatorship". For the past few decades, the Mexican economy has taken a strong fall immediately following the presidential elections every six years.
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