Vicente Fox says he helped Felipe Calderón win 2006 Mexican election, Digi Mart USA News (Mexico): Former Mexican President Vicente Fox Quesada said he worked to ensure Felipe Calderón won the 2006 presidential election, enabling the National Action Party (PAN) to remain in power. In an interview with journalist Juan Luis Cebrián for the outlet The Objective, the former president said he believed the succession should stay in the same hands and that he would not hand power to another party, in this case the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“In 2006 the next election came and Calderón won. Can I say it here?
I made Calderón win, although it is not very democratic to say that,” Fox said. “If it had fallen to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, I would not have given him the presidential sash because of the anger it would have caused me, even being a democrat,” he added.
In the conversation, Fox compared his decision to a businessman deciding who should inherit a company. He said he concluded that the federal government should remain under his party’s control.
“I told myself: ‘Vicente, you are going to leave power to someone from the PAN, so start working. You have to win so the PAN stays and you can hand over the reins of the country,'” he said.
Fox recalled that Calderón won the election by a narrow margin over López Obrador, who refused to recognize the result. “The advantage was so minimal that it raised doubts in the opposition and in López Obrador, who held demonstrations and nearly sparked a revolution at the time of the swearing-in,” Fox said.
At her press conference on Tuesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum addressed the issue while recalling the 2005 removal of López Obrador from office, a process she described as a political maneuver to “prevent his participation in the 2006 election.” In a post on her official account on X, Sheinbaum wrote: “In 2006, then-president Vicente Fox was the architect of electoral fraud.
He confessed to it in an interview in recent days. Is this the democracy they want to return to?
The one of electoral fraud?”
The former president’s statements also drew criticism on social media, with some users alleging his involvement in an electoral crime during his administration. These claims have not been independently verified by Digi Mart USA News.
