A Bittersweet Victory; Mexico may have a new president. But putting together a government will be another story.

Byline: Joseph Contreras

Felipe Calderon's long and winding road to the presidency of Mexico may have reached its end. Last week a federal electoral tribunal announced the results of a partial review of the votes in the July 2 presidential election, and the adjusted tally confirmed Calderon's victory over runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by nearly 240,000 votes. The razor-thin margin had ushered in two months of political stalemate and tension as Lopez Obrador cried fraud and ordered his supporters to blockade major thoroughfares in Mexico City. But the court's ruling set the stage for a formal proclamation of Calderon as president-elect, a verdict the seven-judge panel must render this week. "I shall assume my role as president with firmness and clarity," said the 44-year-old nominee of the National Action Party (PAN) on the day the court released the findings of the recount. "[The tribunal's decision] clears up the doubts and insinuations that [our opponents] want to sow among the people."

Or so he hopes. Calderon received less than 36 percent of the ballots cast in the presidential election and the PAN's slate of congressional candidates failed to gain a majority in either house. To rule effectively he'll need to forge a coalition government before taking office in December, and he won't get a helping hand from Lopez Obrador. The nominee of the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution dismissed the electoral court's ruling as "a political decision" and vowed to set up a parallel government in the coming weeks. That leaves the once omnipotent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 years but garnered a mere 22 percent of the votes, along with three smaller left-of-center groups. "I want to make agreements with other parties in the opposition to get a majority," Calderon told NEWSWEEK in June. "I am willing to share the program of the government and the cabinet."

At first blush the PRI would seem an unlikely partner in a Calderon-led government. The center-right PAN was the PRI's only credible opposition throughout most of its decades in power, and the PRI's congressional caucus hamstrung most of outgoing President Vicente Fox's reform legislation throughout his six-year term in office. But the PRI's dismal performance in this year's election may have humbled its leadership, and Calderon met separately with three of its state governors last month. Prospects for cooperation between the once bitter rivals received a boost last week when PRI and PAN congressmen teamed up to elect a new speaker of the lower house over the objections of Lopez Obrador's allies. Some pundits remain doubtful, however. "A real coalition government with a partner that votes with Calderon all the time is very unlikely," says newspaper columnist Sergio Sarmiento. "The PRI and PAN will have some grounds for working jointly on matters like labor legislation and fiscal reforms, but whatever agreements they reach will vanish the closer we get to midterm elections in 2009."

Still, Felipe Calderon has made a career out of proving the skeptics wrong. They sneered two years ago when Calderon, then serving as Energy secretary, announced he would seek the PAN's presidential nomination for 2006 even though another cabinet minister already enjoyed Fox's blessing. They scoffed last spring when he began running TV ads branding the then front-running Lopez Obrador as "a danger to Mexico" who did not respect the rule of law. The ads helped him turn a deficit of between 6 ...