Can He Do the Job?(Mexican President, Vincente Fox)

Ana Maria Sagaon, 62, is one of 16 million Mexicans who voted for Vicente Fox three years ago, vaulting him to the presidency and breaking the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. She thrilled to his vision of "a new Mexico for the 21st century," a "vigorous, competitive" nation, free of the corruption and economic mismanagement that besmirched previous governments. But these days she's having second thoughts. "All he has are good intentions," she says. "The job is too big for him."

That perception has taken root across the country. The president's once ambitious reform agenda has been blocked by a hostile Congress. The economy is a mess, partly because of the global recession. But top industrialists have lately begun blaming Fox as well; just recently, the head of the Alfa Group, one of the country's largest conglomerates, publicly railed against what he called "the ineptitude of the current administration." Once chummy relations with the United States have chilled over Iraq and Washington's reluctance to sign a sweeping immigration accord. Halfway through Fox's presidency, bets are already being placed on his likely successor. "Here we are in June 2003, and people are already talking about the 2006 elections," says Francisco Abundis of the Parametria opinion-research firm in Mexico City. "It has to do with a sense of failure by the Fox government."

Next month's crucial midterm elections will likely reflect that verdict. All 500 seats in the lower house of the National Congress are up for grabs, along with six statehouses. Fox's center-right National Action Party (PAN) is the favorite in only two of the state gubernatorial races. More important, almost no one expects the party to capture a majority of the congressional seats at stake. That means the legislative deadlock that has squashed Fox's reforms will continue indefinitely.

To some extent Fox is a victim of his own success. Taking office in December 2000, he enjoyed approval ratings around 85 percent. Such was his charisma that even Mexicans who hadn't voted for him bought into his talk of the coming "change" and a new era for Mexico. Few mortals, his defenders say, could have lived up to the stratospheric expectations that accompanied his rise to power.

Critics counter that the incoming president did little to prepare for the challenges ahead. As politicians go, Fox was always something of an outsider. The former Coca-Cola executive, who turns 61 next month, came to politics relatively late. When he was first elected to the federal Congress at 46, he had no clear idea what his new job would --entail, according to biographer Miguel Angel Granados Chapa. As president, Fox assembled a mishmash cabinet drawn from the ranks of business, the political right wing and even the PRI itself. Worse, he came to the presidency lacking the horse-trading skills that more experienced officeholders acquire over time--a shortcoming that became catastrophically apparent when his administration submitted a landmark tax-reform package to Congress in 2001.

To prevail in this first and decisive test, the new government had two options: negotiate a political pact with either the PRI or a leading left-wing party to gain the number of votes needed for passage, or else cow the opposition. Fox did neither, and his fiscal reforms quickly faltered. "The original sin of Fox and his team is that they're a bunch of amateurs," says Raymundo Riva Palacio, editor of the Mexico City newspaper El Independiente. "He never got himself ready to be president," perhaps because he never really expected to win the election.

Can his presidency be salvaged? Fox has several things going for him. He still enjoys a 64 percent approval rating, according to the latest poll by the influential Mexico City daily Reforma. ...