Mexico's former ruling party added momentum for the upcoming presidential race with a crushing victory in the country's biggest state, according to results early yesterday.
The win by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came only a day after President Vicente Fox had led a mass celebration to proclaim his July 2000 victory over the PRI -- which had ruled for 71 years -- as "the awakening of Mexico" and the birth of the country's democracy.
If so, his own National Action Party could be going to sleep. It managed only a quarter of the vote on Sunday in Mexico State, once considered a strong point for the party. And it faded to a single-digit showing in the day's other election, Nayarit, where until now it has shared the governorship.
With nearly all of the vote counted, the PRI's Enrique Pena Nieto had 47.6 percent of the vote to 24.8 percent for National Action's Ruben Mendoza and 24 for Yeidckol Polevnsky of Democratic Revolution.
"It was a clear and strong victory," said Pena Nieto, a 38-year-old who had been barely known even in the state a year ago.
His campaign largely ignored ideology, focusing instead on signed promises of public works projects in cities and villages across the state of some 15 million people. Only one more governor's election, in the mid-sized northern state of Coahuila, stands before next July's presidential race. While the PRI has Mexico's best political organization, presidential preference polls show it consistently trailing Democratic Revolution's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, mayor of Mexico City. Polls last month showed a nearly 20-point PRI margin. But with 80 percent of the vote counted, the PRI's Ney Gonzalez had a 45.8 percent to 43 percent lead over Miguel Angel Navarro, who had quit the PRI to represent Democratic Revolution. National Action's Manuel Perez managed only 5.7 percent.
Nieto has family ties to at least four former governors and their allies served several other terms.
Mendoza, 44, hurt himself when he was caught claiming falsely to have had a breakfast with Fox, as well as when he was filmed amid a mob raiding a truck of PRI promotional toys.
The Democratic Revolution candidate puzzled many when she acknowledged having changed her name from the very Mexican Citlali Ibanez to something most Mexicans can barely pronounce.
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