( L - R ) Calderon and Lopez Obrador

MEXICO CITY (Reuters):

Mexico's top electoral court will make its final ruling on the fiercely disputed July 2 election yesterday, and is almost certain to name ruling party conservative Felipe Calderon as president-elect.

Losing left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador alleged widespread fraud on election day, but the court's seven judges threw out those claims last week.

They must still rule on whether the entire election process was clean before giving a final vote count and declaring the winner.

The court said yesterday the magistrates will announce who is the president-elect in a public session at 8 a.m. (1300 GMT) on Tuesday. Their decision cannot be appealed.

Lopez Obrador has called large street protests and sit-ins in the capital to protest what he has said is vote fraud and will refuse to recognise Calderon as president.

His leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, says President Vicente Fox broke the law by backing Calderon with public funds and that business leaders violated campaign finance rules in support of the conservative candidate.

If the court accepted those arguments, it could annul the election and call a new vote, meaning Congress would have to pick an interim president.

But a ruling in favour of Calderon is widely considered a formality after the court's rulings last week, and Lopez Obrador's aides say he also believes the court will decide against him.

"NOTHING CAN STOP IT"

Fox's spokesman Ruben Aguilar was so confident on Tuesday that he said the court's decision was already made and that Calderon would take office on Dec. 1.

"There is nothing that can stop it, because it is the people's decision. People voted, they expressed themselves. The court ruled on the election, it decided who is president-elect," Aguilar told reporters.

The original election result gave Calderon a wafer-thin victory of around 244,000 votes, or 0.58 percentage points.

Victory for Calderon, educated at Harvard, is good news for the United States after years of a left-wing advances in Latin America.

Thousands of Lopez Obrador supporters have crippled central Mexico City for the last month, setting up sprawling camps in the vast Zocalo square and on an elegant boulevard running through the business district.

The leftist former mayor of Mexico City has called a mass meeting of supporters for Sept. 16, Mexico's independence day, and plans to set up a radical parallel government.

"We are going for deep change, root change, because that is what Mexico needs," he said at a rally on Sunday. "It is a radical transformation. We are going for the construction of a new country that is fair and honourable."

It is not clear how Lopez Obrador plans to run his separate government and his street protests appear to have lost steam in recent weeks.

Still, his PRD could still make life difficult for Fox and Calderon by calling new protests, blocking highways and using their position as the No. 2 force in Congress to stop Calderon's planned economic reforms.

Leftist lawmakers prevented Fox from delivering his last annual state of the nation speech to Congress on Friday by simply seizing control of the podium and refusing to give way when Fox arrived.

He was forced to return to his residence but later delivered the speech in a national televised address.