Lopez Obrador Says He’d Halve Presidential Pay

MEXICO CITY —  Seeking to bolster his image as a populist, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged Thursday to cut the presidential salary in half if elected to Mexico’s highest office and said he would work to end the generous pensions paid to former presidents.

Lopez Obrador said he would accept 50% of the approximately $173,000 a year earned by President Vicente Fox, a slight increase over his mayoral salary of about $82,000 a year. The front-runner in the 2006 presidential race, he has prided himself on cutting tens of millions of dollars from the city bureaucracy in the last few years, and he says he would apply the same penny-pinching management to the federal government, starting with his own paycheck.

Lopez Obrador has also promised to shun the presidential mansion known as Los Pinos in favor of more modest quarters in the National Palace in the historic city center.

Critics dismissed the announcement as a headline-grabbing ploy that would do nothing to solve Mexico’s fiscal woes. But some analysts say the symbolism is powerful in a nation where many officials have used public office to line their pockets.

“Unlike most other politicians in Mexico, he really understands what the public is peeved about,” said Pamela Starr, a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute here. “The public despises politicians that enrich themselves through public life. They have been begging for a politician that would make this kind of statement.”

Waiving or cutting one’s public salary is a time-tested way for U.S. elected officials to try to win support from voters, especially if they are independently wealthy. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepts none of the $175,000 governor’s pay. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan worked for a dollar a year, as does New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. John F. Kennedy donated his presidential paycheck to charity.

But longtime Mexico observer George W. Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said he couldn’t recall an elected official in Mexico who had volunteered to take a pay cut.

“On the contrary,” Grayson said, in Mexico “public office is widely viewed as a license to increase your resources.... This reinforces [Lopez Obrador’s] image as a person of austerity who doesn’t want to waste taxpayers’ money.”

A widower, Lopez Obrador lives in an apartment in a modest neighborhood and drives a late-model compact car. He has promoted this frugal image in a bid to distinguish himself from opponents.

The media have delighted in contradicting his cheapskate persona. The mayor’s logistics coordinator, who doubles as his driver, earns nearly $100,000 a year. A photographer recently captured the Hugo Boss label in one of the mayor’s suits, and the photo was magnified in a national newspaper. And the media mocked him for recently sporting a platinum Tiffany watch, a bit of bling that he said was a gift from a friend.

Still, Lopez Obrador has his rivals on the defensive with his plan to cut the presidential salary and get former officeholders off the public dole. Asked Thursday by reporters whether he too would be willing accept a pay cut, Santiago Creel, Mexico’s interior minister and the likely presidential candidate for Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, refused to answer. Instead, he dismissed Lopez Obrador’s pronouncements as “trivialities.”

Officials from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, declined to comment.

The president is Mexico’s most highly compensated public official. Constitutional experts say Lopez Obrador would not be able to change his compensation if elected. That responsibility falls to the House of Representatives.

Jorge Triana, a PAN member of the House, said, “If the head of the government is so generous, better that he send a proposal to the House of Representatives to receive no salary at all.”

Cecilia Sanchez in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.