Teaching Comparative

Mexican election

Reviled as a creaky remnant of Mexico's authoritarian past, the old Institutional Revolutionary Party made a big comeback in midterm congressional elections in defiance of those who had written off what is still the country's biggest and most representative party...

With 96 percent of the votes counted by early Monday, the PRI was winning about 36 percent of votes for Congress, to about 28 percent for President Felipe Calderon's conservative National Action Party, the PAN...

Despite the PRI's rhetoric about "a new mentality," it appeared to win Sunday's elections by hewing to the cautious middle road that it plotted while running Mexico from 1929 to 2000, as well as taking advantage of voters' frustration with the ideological and policy swings of its rivals...

Meanwhile, the leftist party that almost won the presidency in 2006 has splintered amid infighting, dropping to around 12 percent of the vote and leaving the field open for the PRI.

"The PRI today is a different concept than the PRI that governed for 70 years. That PRI died in 2000," said pollster Maria de las Heras, noting the party has become more fractious and divided between regional interests than it was when the all-powerful, unquestioned president – invariably a PRI member – ran both the country and the party.

"The elections weren't run by the national party leadership; they were run by 17 state governors," opening the potential for internal and legislative paralysis as leading PRI governors jockey for the 2012 presidential nomination, she said.

The question now becomes which PRI member comes out on top. Early polls have favored the young governor of Mexico state, Enrique Pena Nieto, who has often featured on the covers of society magazines...

The PAN will lose some of its 206 seats in the lower house, and the PRI stands to more than double its 106 seats.

De las Heras said Calderon could face a long stretch as a lame duck because "the race for 2012 is already on."

Labels: elections, Mexico, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:12 AM