MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A leftist anti-poverty campaigner took a slim lead over his conservative rival in a dramatic recount of Mexico's presidential election vote on Wednesday and warned the country's stability was at stake.
In scenes reminiscent of the Florida recount in the U.S. presidential vote in 2000, the divided nation bit its nails as partial returns showed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador overtaking Felipe Calderon, who ended a just ahead in an initial count.
Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, led pro-U.S. lawyer Calderon by 2 percentage points in the recount of 80 percent of polling stations but it was still too early to declare a victor from Sunday's vote.
Protests broke out in the capital to press home claims that the leftist was the victim of fraud in the preliminary count.
Lopez Obrador warned electoral authorities to be thorough in the recount, expected to last about a day.
"The stability of the country is at stake," he said.
The Harvard-educated Calderon would be an ally of the United States in Latin America, where left-wing leaders critical of Washington have taken power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela in recent years.
Lopez Obrador, a former Indian welfare officer, has promised to renegotiate a North American trade pact to block cheap U.S. corn and beans entering Mexico as of 2008.
'VERY TIGHT'
Luis Carlos Ugalde, the head of the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, refereeing the contest, warned the recount result would be a cliffhanger.
"The margin of difference is undoubtedly going to be very tight at the end," he said. "Lopez Obrador may be ahead but that could increase or decrease," he said.
Mexico's presidential election is too close to call as electoral authorities work round the clock to verify vote tallies from Sunday's ballot. With counting almost complete, conservative candidate Felipe Calderon overtook his leftist rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by a fraction.
Both candidates have insisted they will win but have asked their supporters to remain calm whatever the outcome.
The Federal Electoral Institute says it expects to announce the result soon.
But whatever the outcome, the candidate that loses will inevitably challenge the outcome, says the BBC's Daniel Lak in Mexico City.
The IFE will hand the final result over to a seven-judge tribunal and legal proceedings are then almost certain to begin.
As the final figures come in, the gap between Mr Lopez Obrador and Mr Calderon has narrowed to just thousands of votes out of a total of 41 million ballots cast.
Mr Lopez Obrador took the lead as the verification process started, only for Mr Calderon to pull slightly ahead as results came in from his electoral strongholds.
The recount has involved checking the tallies attached to ballot boxes, which were sealed after Sunday's election.
Mexico’s electoral authorities on Wednesday admitted that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftwing candidate in last Sunday’s hotly disputed election, could still triumph.
With 98.45 per cent of the unofficial count completed, Felipe Calderón, the centre-right candidate for the ruling National Action Party (PAN) still leads his leftwing rival.
But as the official count began on Wednesday morning – a winner is expected to be declared within a maximum of four days from Wednesday – it emerged that the addition of about 2.6m votes omitted from the provisional count had narrowed an already small lead of 402,000 votes to a razor-thin 257,000 or 0.6 per cent of the total.
“It is a photo finish,” a high-ranking official at Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) told the FT on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, a top PRD congressman questioned the missing votes, suggesting they were just one of several “inconsistencies” to have arisen in the count. But on Wednesday, IFE explained that they were excluded in line with rules agreed by all Mexico’s political parties prior to the election.
The continuing uncertainty about who will become Mexico’s next president is likely to worry Mexico’s business classes, who had initially celebrated Mr Calderon’s slim lead at the beginning of the week. The stock market went up almost 5 per cent following the news on Monday, and the peso saw its biggest one-day rise in six years.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
