Enrique Peña Nieto wins Mexico's presidency, early results show

Enrique Peña Nieto wins Mexico's presidency, early results show

MEXICO CITY â€" Millions of Mexicans voted Sunday to restore to power a once-authoritarian party they dumped 12 years ago, according to preliminary results, while also delivering a harsh rebuke to a government that advanced democratic rule but saw the country plunge into grisly violence.

In an initial, partial count released just before midnight, the federal election commission said Enrique Peña Nieto, the telegenic candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was winning about 38% of the vote. He was leading his nearest competitor, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, by about 6 percentage points.

The election commission figures are meant to be a representative sample of the nationwide vote. Shortly after they were released, Peña Nieto appeared on television to claim victory.

"This Sunday, Mexico won," he said, promising change. He thanked voters and said he would run a presidency that was "responsible and open to criticism."

Peña Nieto was ahead by an even larger margin, as much as 11 percentage points, in exit surveys conducted by pollsters and Mexican news media. And the current president, Felipe Calderon, welcomed Peña Nieto as his successor. But Lopez Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City and leader of a coalition of leftist parties, refused to concede.

Lopez Obrador lost the 2006 presidential race to Calderon by less than 1 percentage point, refused to recognize the results and touched off a wave of protests that paralyzed Mexico City for months.

Peña Nieto's win would return to power the party that ruled virtually unchallenged for seven decades until its defeat in 2000, which ushered in an era of government under the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.

Josefina Vazquez Mota, the candidate for the incumbent party, was by all accounts a distant third. She conceded defeat less than an hour after voting ended.

Sunday's vote could prove disastrous for the PAN, which came to office with enormous promise but has left many Mexicans disillusioned with their nation's democratic transition and a raging drug war.

Calderon was barred by law from running for a second term.

Voting was mostly peaceful Sunday, but there were numerous complaints of slow-to-open polling stations, long lines and shortages of ballots. The army announced on the eve of the vote that it was redoubling forces in the border city of Nuevo Laredo after suspected drug traffickers detonated a car bomb outside City Hall on Friday.

Tens of thousands of troops are deployed across Mexico to fight powerful drug cartels who supply users in the United States with much of their cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine. That fight, launched by Calderon soon after he took office, has claimed more than 50,000 lives in nearly six years.

Mexicans are dismayed with the violence, which has also touched off waves of kidnapping and extortion, and dissatisfied with sluggish economic growth. They seem willing to return to a party that once represented an undemocratic system of coercion and repression, but claims to have reformed.

At the PRI's headquarters, a victory party began moments after the first exit poll results were announced. Scores of employees of Mexico's state-owned oil company, Pemex, decked out in red T-shirts waved flags with the party logo and chanted, "We are going to win! We are going to win!"

Cesar Santiago, wearing a red hard hat adorned with a PRI sticker, said a Peña Nieto win would bring improvements to the country's lethargic economy and reduce violence. "It was a failure," Santiago said of the drug war. "It should have been better planned, with a better strategy."

Santiago said th e PRI had changed since last time it ruled, a reign infamous for corruption and, occasionally, strong-arm tactics to maintain its almost complete dominance over Mexican life. "The PRI-istas who are there now are young. They really want Mexico to improve."

But a few rows away were signs of the old, coercive PRI. Four young women sat gripping rolled-up PRI flags. They said they were required by bosses at Pemex to attend the PRI party. "If we don't come, we don't go back to work," said one of the women, who declined to give her name to avoid being punished by the company. She said she voted for Lopez Obrador.

"It's like the '60s," she said, referring to coercive PRI tactics of the past. "It hasn't gone away."

In Atlacomulco, Peña Nieto's birthplace outside the capital in the state of Mexico, the mood from early in the day was triumphant. Peña Nieto served as governor of the state, Mexico's most populous, until last year.

Voters in Atlacomulco, a bastio n of PRI sympathy, jostled in hopes of getting a photograph with Peña Nieto, 45.