A giant tent city has been blocking one of Mexico City's main thoroughfares for over a month. Up to 30,000 people have been protesting  in support of their idol, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The left-wing presidential candidate has been inciting his supporters to reject the election of Felipe Calderon as the next president of Mexico.

The loser of the July 2 presidential elections has claimed that his conservative rival's wafer-thin lead -- 0.58 percentage points, or 243,934 votes -- was a result of systematic vote-rigging. However, following a partial recount, the Federal Electoral Tribunal has already ruled that no electoral fraud took place. The judges are due to announce their final ruling on the issue later Tuesday and they are widely expected to declare Calderon the winner rather than agreeing to Lopez Obrador's demands for a re-election or a complete recount of the 41 million votes cast.

It had been hoped that the presidential elections would finally anchor Mexico's fledgling democracy but instead they have polarized Mexican society into two opposing camps. Only six years have passed since conservative candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential elections, thus ending over seven decades of single-party rule by the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). Now the populist Lopez Obrador, a former PRI member who founded the left-wing Party for the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989, is threatening to destabilize Mexican democracy with his protracted campaign to overturn the election results.