Mexico's youth vote for status quo

MEXICO CITY -- What surprised me the most about Mexico's presidential elections Sunday was not the virtual tie between the center-right and the center-left candidates but the fact that so many young people voted for the candidate of continuity, globalization and closer ties with the United States.
The vote of the young was pivotal in Mexico's election: Of the 13 million registered new voters, 12 million were ages 18 to 23. And most young people seemed to have voted for pro-business candidate Felipe Calderon.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that young people tend to vote for leftist candidates who want radical change, an exit poll by the Mexico daily Reforma shows that, among youths ages 18 to 29, a total of 38 percent voted for pro-business Calderon, 34 percent for leftist former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the remainder for centrist candidates.
Conversely, among older voters, most people voted for the leftist candidate. The exit poll shows that, among people ages 50 and older, Lopez Obrador got 37 percent of the vote, while Calderon got only 34 percent.
Is Mexico's youth shifting to the right? Or is Mexico's left out of touch with the new generations of Mexicans, who have grown up with the 1994 free-trade agreement with the United States?
Non-idealistic message
Calderon, 43, is nine years younger than Lopez Obrador. But most pollsters say that Calderon -- a church-going conservative who dresses in dark suits, wears glasses and looks like a brainy lawyer -- appealed to the young mostly thanks to his down-to-earth, non-idealistic message.
Calderon's campaign slogan was "mas inversion, mas empleos" ("more investment, more jobs"). In his campaign rallies, he called for a more globalized Mexico that would draw more international investments, increase exports and become more competitive in the world economy.
By comparison, Lopez Obrador's campaign focused on the traditional issues of Mexico's left: the high levels of inequality, the excessive concentration of economic power, the need to launch massive programs to reduce poverty and a foreign policy based on "national sovereignty" and "self-determination" to protect the country from undue U.S. influence.
"Young people saw a more promising future under Calderon than under Lopez Obrador," Cesar Ortega, head of the polling firm Ipsos-Bimsa, which conducted a similar exit poll for the daily El Universal, told me after the election. "They felt more attracted by Calderon's pragmatic platform than by Lopez Obrador's 19th-century heroic nationalism."
Most pollsters say votes for Calderon were votes for continuity and were cast by people who felt that the country is going in the right direction. In addition to the young, Calderon won among women, city dwellers, people with the highest education levels and people who said they are better off this year than last year, the polls show.
Lopez Obrador won among the elderly voters, people living in rural areas and among the poorest of the poor.
City dwellers
But Mexico has become a more urban country in recent years -- more than 80 percent of its people live in cities. The economy is growing by more than 4 percent this year after several years of sluggish growth. And over the last five years, Mexico's poverty has gone down from 53 percent to 47 percent of the population -- a small drop, but one that could become meaningful if the downward trend continues.
There is no doubt that Lopez Obrador -- who was leading in the polls before Election Day -- lost some ground in the final stretch of the campaign. His verbal attacks against the big-business Business Coordinating Council made him an easy target for Calderon's claims that a leftist government would bring about social confrontation, capital flight, factory closings and fewer jobs. Many people got scared.
My conclusion: Whatever the final outcome of the election, Mexico's left has done well. It will become the second-largest bloc in the Mexican Congress. But its biggest challenge will be to do what leftist parties did in Spain, Chile and several other countries: capture young voters with a message of modernity and a sense that it can be a successful player in the global economy.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.