López Obrador is a handicap

The chances of success of the legal challenge to Mexico's recent presidential elections mounted by the Mexican left, grouped around the candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are extremely slim. They claim that the victorious Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) bought and manipulated millions of votes, but the seven-percentage-point advantage of the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto over his leftist rival (the equivalent of three million votes) presumably constitutes a solid argument in the eyes of the electoral authorities that evidence is lacking of irregularities on a grand scale. They have until September to issue a judgment in the case.

Clearly, the ongoing street protests against Peña Nieto's win express the dissatisfaction of many Mexicans with the PRI's imminent return to power. The same party held an iron grip over the country for seven decades until its electoral demise in 2000. But the anxiety-making march back to power of a party that is so intimately linked to corruption -- although this time it lacks a majority and will need to reach accords with others -- cannot hide the fact that the populist López Obrador has always been a bad loser.

He is showing that now, although it is curious to note that he has not denounced the result of congressional elections, held on the same day and under the same conditions as the presidentials -- perhaps because his leftist coalition became the second-largest force in parliament. And he also showed it in 2006 in a totally unacceptable manner when losing the vote to lead the country by less than one point, to the conservative PAN candidate Felipe Calderón. On that occasion, López Obrador declared himself to be the legitimate president, for months keeping a destabilizing street-protest movement on the go in the capital city.

The Mexican left has racked up a long list of failures to win the presidency since 1988. For López Obrador's colleagues, surely the time has come to ask themselves if they should continue to be led by a man who has twice been defeated and who has a tendency to sense a conspiracy in that outcome - and whose abrasive style has alienated a section of his natural support.

López Obrador is holding back the left. In his own PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) there are leaders -- such as Marcelo Ebrard, chief of the Federal District government, or his successor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, among others -- who are sufficiently pragmatic and open to dialogue to avoid being rejected by the electorate, and who are much more in tune with the realities of Mexico today.