In Mexico's fiercely contested elections of July 2006, two battle-scarred ideas confronted each other: nationalism and neoliberalism. In the nationalist camp stood Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD); in the economically liberal camp, Felipe Calderón of the ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the continuity candidate. Calderón won by a whisker – 35.89 per cent to 35.31 per cent – provoking an infuriated López Obrador, the challenger riding the wave of left-wing sentiment that has swept across Latin America since 2000, to denounce the electoral outcome as fraudulent.

Yet, despite their differences, both men had much in common, for both were champions of political traditions that have been locked in a fateful, and perhaps even perpetual, struggle for supremacy that has been at the heart of Mexican development since the nineteenth century yet has always been cut in contemporaneous cloth. By a dramatic irony, the struggle between Calderón and López Obrador revived the atmosphere of an ideological confrontation during elections in 1988 that had a remarkably similar outcome. On that occasion, a forceful neoliberal technocrat, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had become president after the most closely fought elections in Mexico's post-revolutionary history, the results of which favoured the then ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) but were denounced as fraudulent by the left-wing coalition draped in the colours of Mexican nationalism that was challenging it.

Salinas is a key figure in contemporary Mexican history because Calderón and his party today are natural heirs to the radical economic liberalism articulated in the early 1990s by the PRI president, whose government overturned nearly a century of rule in Mexico according to the precepts of a statist ideology premised on ‘revolutionary nationalism’. The populistic and charismatic López Obrador, in turn, is the natural heir to this latter doctrine, originally associated with the PRI and endlessly restated by the party as the mantra of the bloated bureaucratic regime that would be thrown into disarray by the reformists of the 1990s. Accordingly, López Obrador pledges a return to the redistributive and protectionist hearth of Mexican nationalism, and so strident has been his antipathy to what Salinas stood for that he refuses to name him, resorting instead to describing him as ‘the Unmentionable One’.