Felipe Calderón, a former energy minister and one-time long-shot candidate, was unanimously declared president-elect of Mexico Tuesday by a special election court that has been under intense pressure to end a two-month electoral crisis.

The decision caps a ferocious legal battle over the disputed July 2 election that has severely tested the cornerstone institutions created in the past decade to solidify Mexico's transition to a true democracy.

Despite the intensely awaited ruling, the capital remained in a state of upheaval because of protests led by the runner-up, former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has vowed to defy the ruling. López Obrador has said he will set up a parallel government, and his supporters, who have blocked main thoroughfares and camped in the city's downtown square, are threatening to stop Calderón from being inaugurated in December.

Hundreds of López Obrador's followers demonstrated outside the court building on Tuesday; some sobbed and others chanted "vote by vote," the candidate's rallying cry for a full recount.

The special court, known as the Federal Electoral Judicial Tribunal, certified a razor-thin margin of 233,831 votes, or about half-a-percentage point of the 41 million votes cast. The final tally is the result of an excruciating legal process that included the annulment of tens of thousands of votes and a recount of ballots cast in 9 percent of polling places.

"Let's hope that we close this electoral process by forgetting our confrontations," Leonel Castillo, the tribunal's chief magistrate, said moments before declaring "the citizen Felipe Calderón Hinojosa" president of Mexico.

The decision Tuesday by the tribunal, which was created 10 years ago as part of a democratic movement, follows its pattern of consistently ruling in favor of Calderón. One month after refusing López Obrador's request for a full recount, the tribunal also refused his request to annul the election. Even as the tribunal was ruling against López Obrador's overall request, some of the magistrates were agreeing with the complaints he has raised about the electoral process.

Two of the magistrates announced that President Vicente Fox, the standard bearer of Calderón's National Action Party, put the validity of the election at risk by making political comments during the course of the campaign. Mexican law prohibits the president from campaigning.

Magistrates also rebuked former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar for endorsing Calderón during the early stages of the campaign, a statement that violated prohibitions on foreign political figures campaigning in Mexican elections.

Still, the tribunal ultimately concluded that the interventions by Fox and Aznar - as well as prohibited advertisement campaigns by business groups in favor of Calderón - were not enough for them to overturn the results of one of the closest presidential elections in Mexican history. The magistrates also rejected López Obrador's claims of widespread fraud, including the alleged rigging of computers to assure a Calderón victory and massive alterations of vote-tally sheets.

Calderón will ascend to Mexico's highest office with the difficult task of confronting a large, hostile block of opposition lawmakers from López Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, as well as two smaller parties that backed López Obrador's candidacy. The PRD secured its largest congressional gains in the July election and now control more than 30 percent of seats, a congressional presence sufficient to block or slow down Calderón's initiatives.

Calderón's presidential victory comes after a remarkable series of unlikely political wins. He is the son of the National Action Party's founder, but he had to overcome a large disadvantage to be elected president of the party in the 1990s. Later, Fox backed another candidate for the party's presidential nomination, but Calderón waged a savvy campaign to secure the party's nod.

Once the campaign began, Calderón seemed to have little chance. López Obrador held an overwhelming lead in the polls, drawing on his popularity with Mexico City's legion of poor voters and his promises to increase pensions for the elderly and use government construction projects to create millions of jobs. Calderón, who lacks López Obrador's charisma on the stump, chipped away at his opponent's lead with a disciplined campaign that painted his opponent as a danger to Mexico and compared him with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who has been criticized as authoritarian.

Calderón also promised to continue the free-trade policies of Fox, a Bush administration ally who has clashed repeatedly with López Obrador. In some respects, Calderón has become a side player in the ongoing saga in the past two weeks as López Obrador and his supporters have turned their vitriol on Fox. On Friday, PRD lawmakers seized control of Mexico's congressional chamber and blocked Fox from delivering his State of the Nation speech. He is the first president in Mexican history to not deliver the annual speech before the Mexican congress.

Mindful of the overheated environment, the tribunal urged the candidates and their political parties on Tuesday to take the "high road" in debating the day's events. That seemed highly unlikely. Even before the decision was announced, López Obrador and his top lieutenants were saying the only way they would enter into conciliation talks with Calderón is if he quits and refuses to take office.

Intellpuke: You can read this article by Washington Post Foreign Service correspondent Manuel Roig-Franzia, reporting from Mexico City, Mexico, in context: click here