MEXICO CITY — Felipe Calderon, a diminutive but determined 44-year-old conservative, was inaugurated Friday as president of a deeply divided Mexico amid fisticuffs between rival lawmakers and raucous protests in the country's "legislative palace."
Leaders of the largest opposition party in Congress, the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, say Calderon's election was illegitimate, and they battled conservative congressional deputies and senators on the floor most of the week. But the leftists failed in their attempt to keep legislators out of the chambers to prevent a quorum for the joint session of Congress.
Friday morning, after leftist lawmakers barricaded most of the doors with chairs in a last-ditch attempt to keep the president-elect out, Calderon emerged through a back entrance. He squeezed into a phalanx of bodyguards and loyalist legislators, and took the oath of office.
With European princes, Latin American leaders, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other dignitaries looking on from two balconies, Calderon raised his hand and sometimes shouted as he recited the 62-word oath amid a chorus of derisive whistles.
The swearing-in ceremony lasted less than two minutes.
"Felipe will fall! Felipe will fall!" leftist legislators chanted.
"Yes we did it! Yes we did it!" the legislators of Calderon's National Action Party, or PAN, shouted as Calderon exited.
In a speech later before a friendly audience of invited dignitaries and political leaders at the city's National Auditorium, Calderon said he would reach out to his rivals and try to heal the wounds of a long and bitter fight over the election.
"It's obvious that Mexico is living moments of tension between its leading political movements," Calderon said. "I am aware of the seriousness of our differences, and I assume full responsibility to resolve them and reunify Mexico."
Calderon's rival, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, had declared himself Mexico's legitimate president in his own swearing-in ceremony Nov. 20 before 100,000 people in this city's central square, the Zocalo.
On Friday, a much smaller crowd came to the Zocalo to hear Lopez Obrador speak.
"We are not rebels without a cause," Lopez Obrador said. "People forget that they stole the election from us. People forget that a neofascist oligarchy blocked our path. That minority is the one responsible for the political crisis in this country."
