MEXICO CITY — New President Vicente Fox has been in office for less than seven months, but there’s already a contender to replace him in 2006.
Zacatecas Gov. Ricardo Monreal told the internet web site Reforma.com that he wants to be Mexico’s next president. The interview was published Tuesday by the site’s owner, the newspaper Reforma.
“I want to be very clear on that. Yes, I aspire (to the presidency) because politics has to be changing,” he said. “Politics has always been full of double-talk and simulation.”
Monreal appears to be following a path similar to that of Fox, a state governor who spent years ahead of the July 2000 election building an independent campaign organization that almost forced his National Action Party to name him candidate.
Fox’s victory ended the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and changed the decades-old rules of Mexican politics. For generations, would-be candidates denied aspirations until the last minute.
“That should be changing,” Monreal said. “If you want to be the leader, you have to want it and I have prepared a long time for that idea.”
Monreal was a popular, left-leaning member of the PRI who bolted from the party in February 1998 when it passed him over as a candidate for governor of Zacatecas. He joined the center-left Democratic Revolution Party and trounced the PRI in Zacatecas elections that year, pulling many PRI loyalists with him.
