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The Economist
Jul 4th 2011, 18:52

MEXICO CITY - The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico uninterrupted for seven decades until 2000, has never lost an election for governor in the state of Mexico. But it is a long time since it won one quite as crushingly as it did last night. Results this morning show that the PRI’s man, Eruviel Ávila, romped home with62.6% of the vote, carrying every single one of the state’s 125 municipalities. The PRI also won convincingly in the two other governor’s races taking place yesterday, taking 57.4% in the big northern border state of Coahuila and reportedly not far off 50% in little Nayarit (whose official results are not yet up on the web, but should soon be here).

Mexico state’s results are the most important, partly because of its enormous size (it accounts for 13.5% of the country’s 112m citizens), but also because its outgoing governor, Enrique Peña Nieto, is the man most likely to carry the flag for the PRI in the presidential election next year. Mr Peña won Mexico state’s governorship in 2005 with just under half the vote; the PRI’s sharply increased share yesterday is a strong endorsement of his time in charge. Astonishingly, the PRI’s share of the vote there yesterday was slightly higher than in the governor’s election of 1993, at which point Mexico was still considered more or less a one-party state.

It was a grim night for the National Action Party (PAN), the conservatives who currently hold the presidency. The PAN had been hoping to avoid third place in Mexico state, but ended up trailing badly, with just 12.5% of the total. Things weren’t quite so dire in Coahuila or in Nayarit, where the president’s party managed a reasonably strong second place. Panistas point out that only six months ago they helped to deprive the PRI of a victory in the big state of Guerrero. But their hammering in Mexico state, often seen (not wholly accurately) as something of a bellwether of the country’s mood, does not look good for next summer’s presidential race.

The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) can feel content to have won more than a fifth of the vote in Mexico state, pushing the PAN into third place there for the first time. Its candidate, Alejandro Encinas, ran a pretty good campaign and was thought to have come out best in the televised debates. Considering the shambolic beginning to the contest—in which the PAN and PRD fumbled around in an ultimately fruitless effort to form an electoral alliance—things could have been worse. The outcome will make it easier for the PRD to position itself as the main alternative to Mr Peña’s PRI in the presidential race next year.

Candidates are still jostling for the various parties’ nominations. Mr Encinas’s creditable showing in Mexico state may give a boost to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his political ally, who lost the 2006 presidential election by a whisker on the PRD’s ticket. Within the PAN, a field of seven hopefuls seems to be narrowing, with the leaders emerging as Santiago Creel, who unsuccessfully tried for the nomination in 2006, Josefina Vázquez Mota, a former education secretary, and Ernesto Cordero, the finance minister and apparently the president’s favourite.

The PAN’s poor performance in Mexico state could be something of a blow to Ms Vázquez Mota, who had been touted as a possible candidate for governor there but declined, perhaps preferring to focus on her presidential aspirations. She had been seen as someone who might have been able to form an electoral alliance with the PRD, of the sort that led to a rout of the PRI in three big states a year ago. Even without such an alliance, she undoubtedly would have brought in a better result than the PAN’s eventual candidate, Luis Felipe Bravo, who ran a tepid campaign. Mr Creel and Mr Cordero will no doubt try to pin some blame for yesterday’s disaster on Ms Vázquez Mota.

The PRI, by contrast, has done a remarkable job of uniting around Mr Peña. Perhaps learning their lesson from the 2006 election, when infighting ruined the party’s chances, Mr Peña’s rivals have more or less kept quiet so far. As the PAN and the PRD continue to scrap, the PRI moves a step closer to the presidency.


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