NICOLÁS ROMERO, Mexico
For the first time since 1995, when a banking crisis crushed the country's economic aspirations, inflation and interest rates are low enough to begin lifting appreciable numbers of working families into gated communities like the Cantaros III neighborhood here in Mexico State.
With one foot out of Mexico's economic quicksand and children close to graduating from college, the middle-class families here provide a microcosm of the 35 percent of Mexican voters whose loyalties cross political lines and who are avidly being courted by the two leading candidates: Felipe Calderón, a conservative technocrat who is backed by business leaders, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a leftist populist with passionate support among the poor.
Despite rampant government corruption and an all-out war against police officers by this country's powerful drug cartels, the economy seemed at the center of almost everyone's mind. In general, the half dozen voters interviewed here agreed that the past six years of stability had been a welcome relief from the roller coaster ride that spanned the previous two decades. But just as they expressed fear that a sudden change in economic policies would bring crisis, they also vented frustration that the government did not do enough to help the downtrodden.
The seven consecutive decades of corrupt and authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that ended six years ago, is never far from voters' minds. Only a couple of people interviewed said they would vote for the PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, whose reputation has been tarnished by accusations of corruption. And when explaining how they had made reached a decision about either Mr. Calderón or Mr. López Obrador, almost everyone described sorting through the months of hype and negative campaigning and then relying on gut feelings about which candidate was telling the truth.
Here in Cantaros III, where all the houses look and cost the same, the residents' views about politics were all over the map.
Karina Miranda and Rodrigo Hernández, for example, live across the street from each other here. Their backgrounds are so similar and the magnetism between them so strong that at first blush they could be mistaken as a couple.
But get them talking about the race for president, and different kinds of sparks begin to fly. Ms. Miranda, who just graduated from law school and is looking for a job, said she would vote for Mr. Calderón, a former energy minister. Mr. Hernández, who is studying architecture and aspires to develop tourist attractions, supports Mr. López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City.
Ms. Miranda, 25, has seen her family's life improve greatly in the six years since Vicente Fox was elected Mexico's first opposition president. Her mother's 10 years as a nurse at a public hospital qualified her for a low-interest government loan that allowed the family to move six months ago to Cantaros III from a ramshackle house on an unpaved, unlighted street not far away.
She said she supported Mr. Calderón, the candidate from Mr. Fox's National Action Party, because of his promises to keep the country on the same course.
"López Obrador says he is going to take away money from the rich and give it to the poor, but the rich don't keep their money in this country," she said. "So where is he going to get all the money for the poor? From taxes. And who pays the most taxes? The middle class."
Mr. Hernández, 22, said he supported Mr. López Obrador because he saw how hard it had been for his family to raise itself out of poverty, and how many of his friends' families still had not made it.
"I don't think Mexico should be part of a globalized economy because it doesn't have a market that is strong enough to compete," he said. "The lesson we learned from Nafta is that our farmers cannot compete with the United States," he said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Outside Cantaros III, the class lines that divide Mexico and shape presidential preferences are easier to see. But even there, it was clear that Mr. Calderón and Mr. López Obrador had won support from people at all levels of society. In many cases people expressed their preferences as a function of their feelings toward Mr. López Obrador, reflecting his dominance of the spotlight.
To rewind those voices and play them back helps explain why the outcome of this election is anyone's call.
There has been a flurry of commentary by scholars and journalists in major newspapers. Jorge Fernández Menéndez, an investigative reporter and columnist, wrote that Mr. López Obrador's candidacy was marked by a "messianic politics" that "does not accept divergence or different opinions, and has not thought twice about ridding itself of the best men and women of his party if they are not unconditional to him."
Dozens of scholars, scientists, artists and cultural figures, including the novelist Laura Esquivel, the historian Lorenzo Meyer and the astronomer Julieta Fierro, signed full-page ads this week expressing their support for Mr. López Obrador. And last Sunday, the political magazine Proceso reported that of 66 writers, directors, dancers and musicians it had surveyed, not one planned to vote for Mr. Calderón.
There are businessmen like Fernando Schutte, a real estate developer who says he supports Mr. López Obrador because he cannot accept that the economy is healthy when he is doing well but more than half of all Mexicans live on $4 a day. And there are garbage collectors like Antonio Roa who said he would vote for Mr. Calderón because his children got scholarships under Mr. Fox and he wanted such programs to continue. A mechanic, Javier Rodea, 40, said he would vote for Mr. Calderón because he had heard that, "López Obrador is a socialist, and if he wins, it is going to go bad for us."
Manuel Suárez, the owner of two Mexico City hardware stores, said he was going to vote for Mr. Calderón because Mr. López Obrador's politics had inflamed tensions between the rich and the poor.
"He is a vengeful person, not a fair one," Mr. Suárez said of Mr. López Obrador. "He's the kind of person who will do away with the economy and with social peace."
Meanwhile, Juan Antonio José, who is a sales representative for an American hardware company, said he would support Mr. López Obrador because he was "a little more conscientious of the needs of the majority of the people who are poor, and focused more on the local market than the foreign one."
Mr. José said he had been in his job for 15 years and he had seen how Mexican products had lost competitiveness against contraband, and Chinese imports. And he does not buy assertions by analysts like the historian Enrique Krauze and former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda that Mr. López Obrador would govern Mexico the same way President Hugo Chávez runs Venezuela.
"Mexico and Venezuela are two different realities," he said. "For me, somebody who believes that wealth should be distributed a little more is welcome."
The economy has grown so little in recent years that there has not been a lot of new wealth to spread. Still, by upholding the budgetary discipline that began in the late 1990's, the Fox government has been able to keep the peso steady, bring down inflation and revive the middle class.
Rafael Jiménez, an independent pollster doing work for Mr. Calderón, said the stability allowed an estimated 1 percent of the population to move out of poverty and into the middle class in each of the past five years. And, he added, the government provided an estimated 3.5 million affordable home loans for them.
Mexico State, a bustling industrial and commercial corridor that wraps around Mexico City, the nation's capital, is a major hub of that revival. Still, just as the residents of Cantaros III thought they had taken a giant leap to the brighter side of this country's income gap, the poverty they thought they had escaped showed up outside their gates.
Dozens of peasants, most of them farm workers desperate for homes of their own, occupied the hillsides around the condominium complex. They erected a shanty of clapboard houses, and they demanded that the government allow them to buy the land with subsidized credits just like the people inside Cantaros III.
The initials of Mr. López Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, PRD, are written with white-washed stones in the camp.
"We know that we are breaking the law," said Lucrecia Antonio Jiménez, 47. "But we are breaking it out of need. We are willing to do whatever we have to for our own piece of land."
A few weeks ago, the peasants blocked the entrance to Cantaros III to get the attention of government authorities. Instead it seems they shattered the good will from their upscale neighbors.
"Those people don't believe they have to obey any rules, and they should be sent back to where they came from," Ms. Miranda said. "This is exactly the kind of thing that will keep happening if López Obrador becomes president."
Mr. Hernández did not disagree entirely that the peasants ought to be sent home.
"The government has to give credits to poor farmers so they can stay on their land," he said. "Farming was an important part of our past. López Obrador wants it to make it important part of our future."
