Is Mexico ready for an outsider? Does Mexico's former foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, who is likely to announce his presidential candidacy today, stand even a remote chance of winning the 2006 election?

Barring unforeseen circumstances, Castañeda will announce his independent candidacy for the next presidential elections tonight on Mexican television. It will be an almost quixotic quest in a country where three big parties have huge resources and control big political machines.

But, judging from what Castañeda told me in a telephone interview this week, he seems convinced that conditions have changed in his favor. A former leftist intellectual who was one of the architects of center-right President Vicente Fox's electoral victory and later became his foreign minister, Castañeda sees the latest crises of Mexico's political parties as a golden opportunity for his candidacy.

''Political parties were immensely discredited a year ago, and are much more discredited today,'' he says. ``An outsider's chances are . . . proportional with the discredit of the existing political parties and their candidates.''

Castañeda bases his claim on the fact that in the 2003 congressional elections, seven out of every 10 registered voters did not vote for the three main parties. Polls show voters are frustrated over traditional parties' failure to agree on key fiscal, energy and labor reforms in Congress, and over corruption scandals that have rocked them.

The ruling National Action Party (PAN) is weakened by a perception that it has been largely ineffective. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico with an iron hand for 72 years until Fox's 2000 electoral victory, is weakened by bitter internal fights.

And Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, who looked until a few weeks ago as a nearly unbeatable candidate for the 2006 election, suffered a debacle recently with the release of videotapes showing some of the mayor's top aides taking bribes or playing in U.S. casinos.

''I bring independence,'' Castañeda says. ``I am not a party hack, and have never been one. And I bring ideas.''

Castañeda's platform will call for improving education, technology and the rule of law, and to finance much of it by doubling Mexico's oil exports. He hopes to do this by taking advantage of the world's high oil prices and low interest rates to finance the expansion of the state-owned Pemex monopoly without the need of privatizing it.

While stressing that Fox has done ''a good job, in view of adverse circumstances,'' Castañeda laments that the government ``doesn't have any imagination to do anything.''

Castañeda's aides' winning scenario goes like this: by the time the campaign starts officially in January 2006, the three main parties will be as divided -- if not more -- than now. By then, thanks to an early start, Castañeda may reach between 10 percent and 15 percent of voters' intentions in the polls, which will make it hard for the main parties to exclude him from the presidential debates.

If Castañeda made it to the debates, he would most likely win another 10 points, because he is by far the most articulate of all candidates, his aides say. Then, in a four-way race without a runoff election, Castañeda could conceivably win the election with the smallest majority, they say.

Most longtime Mexico observers are skeptical. ''He is a very bright guy, but in the context of Mexican politics, he probably generates more [antagonism] than accolades,'' former Clinton administration White House aide Arturo Valenzuela told me.

''As foreign minister, he alienated potential constituencies: the people of the left were very unhappy at his closeness with the Bush administration, and the people in the PAN were not particularly happy with the fact that he was an independent,'' Valenzuela said.

My conclusion: Castañeda's chances are remote but not impossible. We've seen other outsiders -- like Peru's President Alejandro Toledo, Ecuador's Lucio Gutiérrez and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez -- win elections in recent years.

But he will bring some fresh air to Mexican politics. If anything else, he will challenge Mexico's traditional parties with imaginative ideas and elevate the country's political debate.

Souce: Miami Herald