A Freewheeling Mayor

This chaotic metropolitan area of nearly 20 million doesn't live up to Ebrard's hopes -- it is a place plagued by some of the world's worst air pollution, chronic flooding, brutal traffic, corrupt police, drug-trafficking gangs, rampant car theft and a vicious wave of kidnappings. So, while he is setting about trying to fix those problems, Ebrard, 48, is also forever concocting set pieces, staging cities within his city, realities within his reality. They are productions aimed at Ebrard's best audience, the vast legions of the poor in Mexico City who swarm to each new incarnation in Marcelo-land for a taste of what this city's entrenched elite can fly elsewhere to get.

With each innovation, Ebrard needles Mexico's conservative ruling party, which controls the federal government but holds little sway and gets few votes in Mexico City, a place Ebrard says he wants to remake as "the most liberal city in Latin America." It is a goal he has set in motion by decriminalizing abortion and legalizing gay civil unions -- both firsts in Mexico.

As Ebrard's popularity rises -- and his 2012 presidential ambitions become more obvious ("Any mayor of Mexico City who doesn't want to be president would have to be a mediocre politician," he says) -- he has made himself a national figure and increasingly a target of critics who say he uses the city as his personal political toy.

"Bread and circus. This is demagoguery," Mexican Rep. Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party, says in an interview.

"Irresponsibility. Populism!" Rep. Obdulio Ávila, of Calderón's National Action Party, says in another interview. "He acts like he's the mayor of a little village. I could see all this if we were Paris, maybe. But we're a city with a lot worse problems than Paris. This is just a way of distracting from the principal problems of the city."

To which Ebrard says, "Be patient." Yes, the city has profound problems, he says, but he's asking for everyone to "have some fun" while he embarks on a vast infrastructure rebuilding program, cleans up downtown and expands the sorely overburdened subway system.

"I know I'm infuriating some people who have the money to go to beaches or go somewhere it snows," Ebrard says one recent afternoon over coffee at his dining room table. "We have a very classist tradition here."

To Ebrard's way of thinking, class divisions stifle the city, making it "old-fashioned," "boring," "depressing."

"Do you realize half the young people in this city can't afford to go to a disco or a club?" he says. "So I make these various symbols. Now people can go to a place where there is ice, and they can lie on the sand here in the city."

"Let's do something new," he says over and over. "Something cool."

Then he switches to English.

"Why not?"