Former Mexico State Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto holds a comfortable lead in opinion polls for Mexico’s July 1 presidential election, but his appearance was reminiscent of the campaign-denting moment that Texas Gov. Rick Perry suffered at a Republican debate in November. The GOP hopeful he couldn’t remember one of the three government agencies he pledged to eliminate if he were president and finally said, “Oops!“
The floundering by Pena Nieto, a strikingly handsome man married to a television actress, fed into the images critics have tried to spin around him: telegenic but hollow.
“I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked. I’d have a hard time recalling the titles of the books,” Pena Nieto said during a question-and-answer session the weekend book fair in the western city of Guadalajara.
Pena Nieto said that as an adolescent, he had been influenced by the Bible, and had read “parts of” it.
He then rambled on and on, tossing out confused title names, asking for help in recalling the names of authors and sometimes mismatching the two.
He said he liked “La Silla del Aguila, a novel whose title roughly translates as “The Presidential Chair.” But he said it was written by historian Enrique Krauze, one of Mexico’s most famous historians. It was actually written by Carlos Fuentes, the country’s most famous novelist.
That was about as close as the former governor came to correctly identifying a book he has read in the past decade.
“The truth is that when I read books, the titles don’t really sink in,” he said after several minutes.
Pena Nieto is the leading hope of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to return to the presidency it held for 71 years without interruption before losing the 2000 elections to conservative Vicente Fox.
Television images of Pena Nieto’s struggles ignited glee among PRI critics on Twitter.
Several referred to him as “the Justin Bieber of the PRI,” referring to Bieber’s difficulty in naming all seven continents during a television appearance in November.
But Bieber was at least able to work out the answer with some prompting from host David Letterman.
Pena Nieto couldn’t. He looked to his aides for help and drew laughter from the audience, saying at least twice “I can’t remember the title.” He mentioned he had read a political thriller by Jeffrey Archer.
Several demonstrators showed up at party headquarters in Mexico City on Monday to symbolically give him books on Mexican history.
“It’s really very shameful that a person wants to be president and doesn’t know a single book,” said Hugo Giovanni Aguirre, a university law student.
Pena Nieto accepted the gaffe in Twitter posts Monday, apparently hoping that good grace would calm the controversy.
“I’m reading some tweets about my error yesterday, some are very critical, others are even funny. I thank you for all of them,” he wrote. Later, he tweeted “Freedom of expression is a central pillar of democracy. Criticism of those of us who aspire to or hold political office is fundamental.”
Members of Pena Nieto’s PRI party has their own moments of fun mocking former president Fox, a fountain of verbal flubs who prompted hilarity by mispronouncing the name of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges during a speech before one of Spain’s most important literary gatherings.
But some Mexican intellectuals, even longstanding critics of the PRI, were sympathetic:
“I myself, and I suppose all of us ... have moments when we forget authors, we forget books,” said historian Lorenzo Meyer. “We can’t jump on Pena Nieto because he forgets his writers.”
