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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2006 
Mexico's Calderon Passes First Test in Congress
 Miguel Angel Gutierrez - Reuters
| | Calderon has hit the ground running. |
Mexican President Felipe Calderon has surprised skeptics after his disputed election win and passed his first test in the deeply divided Congress by winning sweeping approval for most of his 2007 budget.
Calderon's razor-thin July election victory was fought in court by leftists crying fraud, and he was badly heckled by opposition deputies at his Dec. 1 inauguration in Congress.
Supporters of defeated leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have vowed to hound conservative Calderon throughout his six years in office.
But Congress, where Calderon's National Action Party has only about 40 percent of the seats, put up little resistance to his budget proposal.
"That the Congress, which is very divided, could give this result is an achievement and a victory for politics," said Emilio Gamboa, leader in the lower house for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the third force in Congress.
Opposition lawmakers scrapped a new tax Calderon wanted to impose on carbonated soft drinks, and raised the forecast oil price for 2007 in order to increase funding for highways, education and rural areas.
The modified package, Mexico's second consecutive balanced fiscal plan after years of overspending, received final approval in Congress by the lower house on Saturday after just a few days of debate.
"It was a good negotiation and all parties gave up ground," said political analyst Marcela Bobadilla. "At the very least I see an openness to dialogue and negotiation. It's a good sign for the start of this government."
Lopez Obrador supporters paralyzed the center of Mexico City for six weeks after the election with a huge sit-in protest against what they said was electoral fraud.
OPEN TO DEBATE
Off the streets, however, Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, is willing to negotiate.
It supported the budget after persuading other lawmakers to back social programs, like a monthly pension of some $45 for the rural elderly.
"We can do political things, we can do legislative things, we can defend ourselves, we can fight, we can agree," said Javier Gonzalez Garza, who leads the PRD in the lower house.
Calderon's party is the largest bloc in Congress but is short of the two-thirds majority he will need to win constitutional reforms.
He is determined to make headway on fiscal, energy and labor reforms that never got off the ground under his predecessor, Vicente Fox.
With Mexico's production of crude oil, a crucial source of dollars for the government, set to stagnate in the next few years, Calderon is under pressure to overhaul the tax system to lift the country's desperately low tax collection rate.
A former energy minister under Fox, Calderon wants to give state-run oil monopoly Pemex more autonomy and allow it to form partnerships with foreign companies that could help it access deepwater oil to boost its flagging reserves.
Calderon has hit the ground running.
In his first days in the job, he launched an army crackdown on drug gangs and appointed a Cabinet that includes opposition party members who could help form a consensus on reforms.
All parties in Congress have agreed to discuss tax reform, and lawmakers from the PRI - which opposed many of Fox's initiatives - say they will talk about energy reform. |
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