Voting in Mexico’s regional elections got underway without major incidents, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Sunday (June 5).
The regional elections pose a major test for the ruling party’s hopes of retaining the presidency in 2018 as discontent over corruption and violence fuels support for the anti-establishment message of a resurgent leftist firebrand.
Voters were choosing new governors in a dozen of Mexico’s 31 states, including bastions of President Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that could fall to the opposition after more than 80 years of one-party rule.
The biggest prize on offer is oil-rich Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico, the third most-populous state, which has been long dominated by a few families under nonstop PRI government.
Opinion polls show Cuitlahuac Garcia, candidate of the new National Regeneration Movement, or Morena, party of two-time presidential runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, running neck and neck in Veracruz with the PRI’s Hector Yunes and his cousin Miguel Angel Yunes, who heads a joint bid by the main centre-right and centre-left opposition parties.
Voting in Mexico City, Lopez Obrador said the country was hungry for change.
“There is a crisis in Mexico. Poverty, corruption, crime and violence, but it’s looking for a way out of the backwardness, the quagmire the country is facing with peaceful and legal procedures through the democratic process, and this is very important,” the leader of the opposition Morena Party said.
Lopez Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, routinely lumps all the established parties together as different faces of the same corrupt system, and if Morena wins Veracruz, it would be a powerful springboard for a presidential run in 2018. Polls show he has a real chance.
There were scattered reports of violence and fraud in the state, a common complaint in Mexican elections, where party campaigners often go door to door with gifts and incentives to entice poorer voters in particular to back their candidates.
But Pena Nieto said, by in large, the elections were running smoothly.
“That the day has been running normally and calmly. That there have only been very isolated incidents. I don’t have any reports of any major incidents and I hope that the rest of the electoral process continues like this,” the president said.
Several contests heading into Sunday were too close to call and surveys suggest the PRI will struggle to defend all nine of the 12 governorships it currently holds.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016