Nine months ago, legislators brawled on the floor of Congress, while protesters rallied on Mexico City’s main boulevard. Amid chaos, Felipe Calderón slipped in through the back door of Congress, took the speaker’s platform and, in a lightning-fast ceremony, became Mexico’s new president. Now, however, the fracas is a distant memory.
More than a year has passed since Mexico experienced one of its rockiest elections ever. On July 2, 2006, Mr Calderón, a former energy minister whose father helped found his National Action Party (PAN), won the presidential race by a hair. His leftist rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), refused to accept defeat and mounted a series of street protests that, for several months, put in doubt whether Mexico’s next president – dubbed an illegitimate usurper by the opposition – would be able to govern.
