It's official — conservative Felipe Calderon will be Mexico's next president, after a two-month battle over fraud claims at a July election and intense protests from supporters of populist rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The decision, handed down by Mexico's electoral court, and the controversy leading up to the unanimous ruling, has split the nation of more than 100 million people along class lines.

After the July 2 election, officials said Calderon, a Harvard-educated lawyer and career politician, had edged out Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor with ardent support among the poor by a slim margin — less than 0.6 per cent of the vote or about 240,000 ballots.

Populist candidate Lopez Obrador and his supporters alleged the poll was rigged, sparking mass protests and legal battles.

But on Sept. 5, 2006, seven judges unanimously rejected allegations of fraud and declared him president-elect in a final ruling that cannot be appealed. The judges' decision had been widely expected after they threw out Lopez Obrador's claims that the election was fraudulent.

The court trimmed Calderon's 240,000 edge slightly to 233,381 votes out of 41.6 million votes cast. And while judges admitted there was evidence of problems during the election, they weren't substantial enough to change its result. Calderon, of the National Action Party, is to be sworn in on Dec 1.

When the ruling was announced, the courthouse shook as Lopez Obrador's supporters set off fireworks and shouted "fraud, fraud." Lopez Obrador was defiant, vowing to contest the official results. Prior to the final ruling, Mexico's Congress was plunged into chaos when dozens of Lopez Obrador's deputies took over the podium to prevent President Vincente Fox from making his state of the union speech.

On July 30, 2006, Lopez Obrador asked supporters to occupy Mexico City to demand a vote-by-vote recount. Tens of thousands obliged. About 40,000 supporters pitched tents and barricades in the capital, crippling Mexico's financial and cultural district and bringing traffic to a snarl. Lopez Obrador declared he would set up a national democratic convention on Sept. 16 — Mexico's Independence Day. Other protests targeted international banks and other financial lynchpins, including Mexican treasury offices.

Mexico's top electoral court did order a partial recount, ruling that there was enough evidence at about nine per cent of the polling stations of reported irregularities. This represents 12,000 of the country's 130,000 polling stations.

(Meanwhile, the country's Federal Elections Institute also levied $6.7 million US in fines against the five main political parties for irregularities in their 2005 financial reports. Lopez Obrador's party was penalized the most.)

Charismatic populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, shown here with a garland of flowers, is trying to wrest power from Vicente Fox's ruling National Action Party and its Harvard-trained leader Felipe Calderon. (Daniel Lopez/Brownsville Herald) (Marco Ugarte/Associated Press)

Calderon, 44, has pledged to continue the free-market reforms Mexico has been trying desperately to put in place these past six years. He was a former energy secretary in Fox's cabinet.

At 52, Lopez Obrador is a charismatic, some say messianic, rousing ultra-populist who talks of "purifying national life" and who once walked 900 kilometres to the capital to protest alleged vote-rigging.

Before the election, Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO to his supporters, was ahead by just a percentage point or two in the polls. But most observers felt the election was going to be too close to call, which is exactly the way it turned out.

The backdrop

After six years of the stately Fox, a businessman turned politician whose National Action Party (PAN) ended seven decades of one-party rule, Mexico seems pretty stable these days. But it was only a dozen years ago that the country was an inflationary mess with the so-called peso crisis requiring an international bailout and Zapatista rebels still actually fighting in the wilds of Chiapas.

Few expect a return to that kind of chaos as a result of the vote. But with a clearly polarized electorate and Lopez Obrador's penchant for the dramatic gesture, nothing is certain.

An exceedingly popular politician, particularly among the downtrodden, Lopez Obrador was nearly prevented from running a year ago when the government tried to impeach him over a minor land deal. But when hundreds of thousands of supporters marched on his behalf in Mexico City, Fox was forced to abandon the action and fire his own attorney general.

Lopez Obrador styles himself as a modern-day FDR. He instituted pensions for the elderly when he was mayor of Mexico City and promised to reallocate income from the wealthy, jump start all manner of public projects and improve social programs. His campaign slogan was: "For the good of all, the poor first."

Calderon once served as head of the country's national development bank, and is favoured by the business community. He has promised to crack down on crime, particularly by implementing life sentences for kidnappers, and marketed himself as the candidate of economic stability and continued low inflation. He has suggested that if he wins, he will try to form a coalition government involving members from the parties of his two major opponents.

That itself would be an important boost for Roberto Madrazo, head of the until-now splintered Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico continuously for 71 years until Fox won the 2000 election. Madrazo is a long-serving politician, a former legislative deputy, senator and governor, who has been courting the Greens and is trying to unite the PRI after it split into factions a few years ago.

Calderon will now take over a country that has been rapidly urbanizing in the past dozen or so years, especially since it signed on to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and watched its formerly closed economy open up dramatically.

NAFTA sparked an early exodus of U.S. and Canadian manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and it also created the beginnings of a stable middle class there. But it did not stop poor Mexicans migrating illegally north into the U.S., or even Canada, for better paying jobs.

What's more, the Mexican economy has grown by only a modest two per cent or so in the first five years of this decade - a poor showing that has created the impetus for political change.

Implications for Canada

The election outcome is being watched closely in the U.S., where illegal migration is a hot-button issue north of the Rio Grande and where Washington is building a huge wall along its southern border.

Neither Lopez Obrador nor Calderon wants to forcibly stop or criminalize illegal migration, according to most reports.

The concern there is that NAFTA is hurting Mexico's small farmers. But any formal attempt to renegotiate NAFTA would likely open a can of worms in Canada, where the deal has never enjoyed overwhelming popularity, especially today in light of the current softwood lumber dispute. It would also put in jeopardy a host of pending NAFTA side deals on a host of (mostly agricultural) products.

In recent years, Mexico has become Canada's fifth largest trading partner, most of that in agriculture and automobile parts, which are often manufactured for just-in-time delivery.

• See Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade's Mexico fact sheet