Mexico leftist rallies crowds to reverse vote loss

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist who came second in Mexico's contested presidential election, played his trump card yesterday when he appealed to the masses to help him overturn his narrow defeat.

Lopez Obrador, who says the election of conservative Felipe Calderon last Sunday was plagued by irregularities, will put his case to a large crowd in the capital's Zocalo square.

He has asked a court to rule against Calderon, who is already looking presidential after a recount gave him victory on Thursday by less than one percentage point.

Lopez Obrador has yet to produce much evidence of large-scale fraud and a team of European Union observers said there was no massive vote-rigging or irregularity.

Lopez Obrador, who has stayed mostly out of public view since Thursday morning, has discouraged violence among leftists, many of whom remember a 1988 presidential election widely believed to have been stolen from them by the government then controlled by the once long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The left is calling for a vote-for-vote recount, instead of just a new count of vote tally sheets as happened this week, even though Mexican law does not allow for a count of every vote.

The Federal Electoral Institute, which ran the election, said officials from all parties, as well as a million citizens who were called at random to help out on voting day, staffed polling stations and few of them reported any problem.