When Mexico's Felipe Calderon announced two years ago that he would run for president, he was forced to resign as energy minister and dismissed as a no-hoper inside his own conservative party, according to Reuters. Short on charisma and hurt by a public squabble with President Vicente Fox, who favored another of his cabinet ministers to succeed him, Calderon appeared to have botched his election bid from the start. "At first it was like jumping from a transatlantic ship ... into the middle of the sea in the middle of the night. It was difficult," he said later. After a surprise, come-from-behind victory in the primary election for his National Action Party, or PAN, he at first trailed in third place for the July 2 election, way behind leftist front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. But Calderon, 44, fought back with a bruising campaign and won an extremely tight race that polarized Mexico's left and right and threatened its young democracy. After months of legal battles and massive street protests, Mexico's electoral court finally declared the elections were clean and named Calderon president-elect on Tuesday. Lopez Obrador insists he was robbed and has vowed to make Mexico ungovernable and possibly set up a parallel government, although his campaign of street protests has lost steam. Calderon's victory bucks a swing to the left across Latin America in recent years and he plans to cut deals with centrist opposition lawmakers to push through pro-business reforms. "Calderon is a pretty good negotiator," said HSBC analyst Benito Berber. "I think he's going to be able to pass some important laws." The president-elect also aims to strengthen ties with Washington helping it in the fight against terrorism and drug trafficking while pushing for reforms legalizing the status of millions of Mexican immigrants in the United States. Short, balding and bespectacled, Calderon's victory against the odds revealed a steely determination and a willingness to play rough when in trouble. Aggressive attack ads that portrayed Lopez Obrador as a danger to Mexico were widely criticized for setting the tone of an ugly campaign, but they were effective and the leftist's double-digit lead in opinion polls quickly evaporated. While Lopez Obrador is a fiery figure who has promised to pull millions out of poverty, Calderon's character was shaped by a bookish Catholic upbringing. "I think the biggest mistake of my childhood was not to enjoy it to the full," Calderon told the MTV music channel before the election, disappointing any viewers hoping for a revelation of a teenage dabble with drink or drugs. "I was one of those who went everywhere with an umbrella, and then I began to walk barefoot more often and enjoy life more," he said. Although they concede he comes across as a dry technocrat, supporters say Calderon's grit and pragmatic style will help him confront more leftist street protests and ensure political and economic stability in his six-year term. Although he is seen as a true son of a party often characterized by its most conservative, Catholic elements, Calderon and his family come from what political scientist Federico Estevez called the party's "centrist fringe." Lopez Obrador alleged the election was manipulated and demanded a full recount, but the electoral court threw out the claims of massive fraud and said it was a clean race. Calderon is a trained lawyer and an economist with a master's degree in public administration from Harvard. When Fox won a historic election in 2000 to end seven decades of one-party rule, he ran a state development bank and then moved to the energy ministry. After just nine months in the post, Calderon declared his presidential ambitions in May 2004, infuriating Fox who was widely seen as backing his interior minister, Santiago Creel. Calderon quit and began campaigning for his party's support. He later highlighted his differences with Fox by dubbing himself "The Disobedient Son", the title of a ballad his mother used to sing. A lifelong party loyalist, Calderon even met his wife Margarita Zavala in the PAN. She was a deputy in Mexico's lower house of Congress.
