| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico 
Leftist Mexico City Mayor Sets Sights on Presidency
 Anahi Rama & Miguel Angel Gutierrez - Reuters
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October 19, 2010
| | Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard | |
Mexico City - Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is gearing up for a 2012 presidential bid, organizing rallies around the country to raise his national profile and win the backing of leftist supporters.
Official campaigning for the presidential race has not yet begun, but Ebrard is angling to become the new face of Mexico's left by displacing popular former Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost the presidency in 2006.
The presidential race remains wide open as President Felipe Calderon struggles to pull the economy out of a deep recession and pushes ahead with a spiraling drug war that has killed more than 29,000 people since he took office in late 2006.
Calderon's conservative National Action Party, or PAN, will face a tough challenge in 2012 both from left and from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000 and is aiming for a comeback.
The PRI's likely candidate for 2012 is the governor of the state of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, whose good looks and soap opera star wife give him a celebrity draw.
As Pena Nieto looks toward a July state election seen as key for his presidential ambitions, Ebrard kicked off a national tour this weekend in Pena Nieto's home turf.
"Why are we here?" Ebrard asked a crowd in the industrial city of Toluca on Sunday. "We have to organize to get the PRI out of the governorship!"
Ebrard's leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, is eyeing a coalition with Calderon's PAN to take on Pena Nieto's chosen candidate in the State of Mexico race in July.
GAY MARRIAGES, ABORTIONS
Ebrard, 51, is best known for promoting progressive laws in the country's sprawling capital, where he legalized abortions and gay marriage and promotes environmental policies like bike riding.
He won popularity by bringing in sand and public pools to create urban beaches in summer and setting up a massive ice skating rink in the city's central square in winter. He won global praise for his handling of an outbreak of H1N1 flu in 2009 by shutting down the city for several days.
But outside the capital, where a fifth of Mexico's population lives, Ebrard is less well-known than Lopez Obrador, who spooked investors when he disputed 2006 election results with street protests paralyzing Mexico City for months.
Lopez Obrador, who was the 2006 PRD candidate and considers himself the "legitimate president of Mexico," still has a large national following and has expressed interest in running in 2012.
The PRD has not defined who will be its candidate in 2012, but if Ebrard is chosen, Lopez Obrador may run with the left-wing Worker's Party. Ebrard says it would be "suicide" for the left to have two competing candidates.
"There can only be one candidate on the left," Ebrard told Reuters earlier this year. "If not, it will be a disaster."
(Additional reporting by Patrick Rucker and Mica Rosenberg; Writing by Mica Rosenberg and Cyntia Barrera; editing by Missy Ryan and Stacey Joyce)
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