MEXICO CITY — Don Quixote, move over. The losing leftist candidate for president swore himself in on Monday as “the legitimate president of Mexico” before a huge crowd of his avid fans, ignoring rulings by federal electoral authorities and the courts that he narrowly lost the election last July.
The candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor who took on Mexico’s entrenched oligarchy, chose the anniversary of the Mexican revolution for the event. He has continued to assert that his opponents used fraud to deny him victory.
Appearing on a stage in the historic Constitution Plaza, with Mexican flags and an enormous eagle banner behind him, Mr. López Obrador promised to goad the government of the president-elect, Felipe Calderón, a conservative from the National Action Party of President Vicente Fox, into adopting his proposals.
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