For many months, the fiery populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was the favourite to succeed Vicente Fox and become the next president of Mexico. His opponent Felipe Calderon, a Harvard-educated former energy minister, was considered too technocratic, too wooden to take the presidency. The left had the wind in its sails, filled by the anti-American, anti-market rhetoric of Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chavez and his imitators. But some time in the past few weeks, the mood began to change. Mr. Calderon ran attack ads comparing his rival with Mr. Chavez and warning of the chaos that might follow if Mexico returned to the protectionism and statism of the past.

Mr. Lopez Obrador faltered in the opinion polls, and in the end came 400,000 votes short of his opponent in the preliminary count -- a thin margin, but one that will be difficult to overcome unless there is a massive shift in the final count of the next few days.

aPs="boxR"; var boxRAC = fnTdo('a'+'ai',300,250,ai,'j',nc); The results seem to show that many Mexicans voted with their heads instead of their hearts, rejecting the siren song of populism. But even if Mr. Calderon prevails -- and there is still a chance he might not -- the voters' verdict was obviously mixed. If they stuck with the party of free trade and open markets, it was not out of any great confidence in that formula, but out of fear of the backward-looking alternative.

The danger is that, with a narrow mandate and a divided Congress, Mr. Calderon would shy away from radical reform and let Mexico drift. That would be a big mistake. Despite what Mr. Lopez Obrador might say, Mexico's problem is not too much free-market reform but too little of it.

In that respect, Mr. Fox's presidency was a disappointment. The economy slogged along at about 2-per-cent growth a year during his six years in office, far short of the rate needed to pull Mexico's masses out of poverty. Millions still stream north for jobs in the United States. Planned reforms of law enforcement, the tax system and the energy sector stalled, blocked in some cases by Mexico's too-powerful unions and in others by recalcitrant deputies in Congress, many of them from the old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Mr. Fox had some real successes. He managed to get through his whole term without a financial crisis, something of a novelty for a Mexican leader. He reduced severe poverty by, among other things, offering cash grants to women in poor households. He helped entrench a democratic culture in Mexico, which is still recovering from a PRI monopoly in politics that stretched through most of the 20th century. But Mexico needs much more change if it is to flourish in the 21st.

The country is still dominated by special interests. Powerful tycoons like Carlos Slim, Mexico's telephone czar, rule the roost in business. The unions fix the labour market at the expense of poor, non-unionized workers. The police remain a law unto themselves. Mexico six years after the collapse of the PRI looks a lot like some East European countries a few years after the fall of communism, free of the monopoly of one party but still beholden to vested interests and still suffering from the stagnation and corruption of the old regime.

It will take a strong hand to sweep all that away. If he wins the presidency, Mr. Calderon will need to be bold. Does he have the right stuff? He might just. What he lacks in charisma, he seems to make up in pluck. He was not Mr. Fox's first choice as successor, but came from behind to take the nomination of his National Action Party (PAN). He was behind through much of the election campaign, but rallied. He grew up in a family that fought the dominance of the PRI; his father helped found the rival PAN. "At home," he says, "I learned never to accept as a given a situation that seemed unacceptable."

He will need all that determination to turn Mexico around.