‘Ruthless’ Mexican Candidate Goes Far. But Maybe Only So Far.

MEXICO CITY — If the candidate was nervous about his chances, few could tell.

Ricardo Anaya was 21 years old and running for elected office for the first time. The prize was a congressional seat in the Mexican state of Querétaro, representing a poor, rural area far from his home in the state capital where he had grown up on a country club. It was enemy territory: His party had never won the seat, and this time would be no different.

But until the final vote tally was announced, the candidate betrayed no sense, beyond his inner circle of confidants, that he might lose.

“He was giving everyone confidence that he could win,” said Jacob Morado García, who was then the local president of Anaya’s party, the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, in the municipality of Pinal de Amoles. “He did everything possible to win.”

Eighteen years later, Anaya now finds himself in a somewhat similar position, though the stakes are many orders of magnitude higher.

At 39, he is running for president of Mexico, and with less than three weeks left before the July 1 vote he is polling in distant second place behind leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Were Anaya to win, it would crown a vertiginous rise to the top of the Mexican political firmament, a climb driven by a consummate political savvy — some say genius — and a ruthlessness that has stunned even the most seasoned political operatives in Mexico.

Despite several recent polls showing López Obrador with a commanding lead of at least 17 points, Anaya and his advisers insist he still has a chance and cite internal polling showing him trailing by only 7 percent.

“I’m absolutely convinced we’re going to win the election,” Anaya told a university gathering this month.

But his confidence is not widely shared, and, indeed, many in the political world have begun to refer to his candidacy in the past tense. His fast and ambitious bushwhacking to the cusp of the nation’s highest office, they say, may have come at too high a price, alienating too many people, both inside and outside his party, who would have been crucial to his effort to secure the presidency.

“He’s the most interesting politician of the last eight years, the way he has risen to the top so unexpectedly,” said José Merino, a political analyst who supports López Obrador. “It was the fastest-growing political candidacy. It might be the fastest dying.” Anaya’s campaign declined requests to interview the candidate for this article.

Short and slim, with a buzz cut and glasses, Anaya, who practices yoga and meditation, cuts a bookish, boyish figure.

On the campaign trail, he has excelled in more refined settings — with business groups, for instance, or in academia — laying out his agenda in measured tones, his arguments smooth and precise, against the backdrop of an artful PowerPoint presentation, or nimbly engaging in question-and-answer sessions. In debates, he has demonstrated excellent preparation and a masterful command of the issues, running verbal circles around López Obrador — though apparently to limited effect in the polls.

Anaya, who is married and has three young children, is known for being remarkably punctilious and disciplined.

“He isn’t a guy you’ll find in a restaurant having a drink — never, never,” said Juan Ignacio Zavala, a newspaper columnist and brother of Margarita Zavala, who was a member of the PAN until, marginalized by Anaya, she quit last year to run for president as an independent. “He’s the kind of politician we haven’t seen often in Mexico.”

While both Anaya and López Obrador have pitched themselves as candidates who can offer a departure from the corruption and violence that has dogged the deeply unpopular administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, Anaya portrays himself as the safer, more moderate bet.

He has also tried to project himself as technologically savvy and future-thinking; he speaks of transforming Mexico from a manufacturing economy to a “knowledge economy,” and he launched his campaign with a hackathon. He has sought to cast López Obrador as anachronistic.

But Anaya’s campaign has been burdened by corruption allegations, as well as by internal disorganization, analysts say, and a shifting, unfocused vision that underestimated both the electorate’s anger at the political system and the popularity of López Obrador, commonly known by his initials, AMLO.

The candidate has also had difficulty connecting with voters on a personal and emotional level, analysts said, an area where López Obrador has excelled.

Anaya has been called too nerdy, too lacking in a common touch. And while he has cast himself as a fresh new option for the nation, he is running under the banner of one of the nation’s two dominant parties and has apparently not convinced enough people that he represents a significant break from the past. Born in Mexico state, just outside Mexico City, Anaya grew up in the central Mexican city of Querétaro, among the city’s elite.

After his failed run for the delegate seat representing Pinal de Amoles, Anaya sprinted from political job to political job, first in the state and then in the federal government, including serving a term in the lower chamber of Congress.

In 2015, he was elected as the PAN’s national president, and a year later engineered the party’s remarkable successes in regional elections, gaining seven of the nine governorships in play and walloping Peña Nieto’s party, the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party.

His momentum seemed unstoppable. By late 2017, he had brokered a coalition between the PAN and the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, to jointly field a presidential candidate for the first time in history. (The left-right ticket also includes the smaller, left-leaning Citizens’ Movement party.)

He then handily vanquished the other contenders for his party’s presidential nomination, including Zavala, whose rejection caused a schism in the PAN.

“His philosophy since he came is: You’re either with me or you’re my enemy,” said Sen. Jorge Luis Lavalle, a party member who has been openly critical of Anaya. “He did terrible damage to the PAN.”

Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at Mexico City’s Center for Economic Research and Teaching, said Anaya has been “a beast” in defeating his rivals.

“Of course, it’s politics, it’s rough and tumble,” Bravo said. “But he played it particularly rough.”

Not even Anaya’s closest allies deny this assessment. “He screwed everybody over in order to get there,” said Jorge G. Castañeda, co-manager of Anaya’s campaign. “On the other hand, a lot of people try to screw a lot of other people over and don’t get there.”

“In Mexico, you’re supposed to be ruthless without anybody noticing,” Castañeda continued. “He neutralized people in a spectacular way. There’s obviously a cost to that.”

Anaya and his supporters have accused Peña Nieto’s party, the PRI, of manufacturing money-laundering allegations that have weighed down his bid, and using the offices of government to promote them.

Things got even uglier in recent days. Anaya’s enemies have circulated videos that purport to corroborate some of the allegations, which the candidate has emphatically denied. Anaya and his team, in turn, have accused López Obrador of making a pact with Peña Nieto to shield the president from prosecution during the next administration, an allegation López Obrador’s campaign and the PRI deny.

Anaya’s campaign is counting on undecided voters and those voters who are uncertain enough to switch allegiances at the last moment. But few outside Anaya’s inner circle seem to believe a victory is even remotely possible.

Analysts say that with or without the corruption allegations or the flaws in his campaign, Anaya has been too closely tied to one of the main political parties blamed for the nation’s ills and has not convinced enough people that he represents a break from the past.

“It may be just inevitable,” said Jeffrey A. Weldon, director of the political science department at ITAM, a Mexico City university, before switching to the past tense as if the results of the July 1 vote were a foregone conclusion.

“People had already decided it was time for a change,” he continued. “And the only candidate that sounded like change was AMLO.”