Mexico leftists deadlock in vote dispute

Mexico’s main opposition party was in disarray Monday after failing to resolve a week-old dispute over the results of a leadership vote.

With the tabulation of votes unfinished, the Democratic Revolution Party’s top election official said bickering between the two main camps had made it impossible to continue the count.

Officials were expected to have announced results by Sunday, a week after nationwide balloting by the PRD, as the left-leaning party is known.

But the tally has been hampered by accusations of fraud from the party’s two main factions: hard-liners allied with firebrand Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and a more moderate wing.

The election fiasco has aggravated internal tensions and heightened fears of a rupture less than two years after Lopez Obrador nearly won Mexico’s presidency as the party’s populist candidate.

The crisis, coming a year before midterm elections, is likely to worsen the party’s slipping fortunes. A new poll Monday showed the PRD would fall next year to third place from second in the number of seats held by the three major parties in Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies.

President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party has the most seats in the lower chamber now, with the once-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party in third.

PRD officials appeared stumped over how to move forward in the party dispute, with the vote tabulation bogged down in about a third of the states and in Mexico City.

Arturo Nunez, a senator who heads the PRD’s election panel, declared Sunday night that the two rival factions were making it difficult to finish counting ballots because of their repeated objections and disputes. He called on party leaders to find a way out of the mess.

The vote-counting fight followed a bitter campaign between Alejandro Encinas, a Lopez Obrador ally and former mayor of Mexico City, and Jesus Ortega, a former senator.

Encinas claimed victory soon after the March 16 balloting, when two polling companies hired by the party showed him ahead based on their samples of the vote.

That outcome was seen as a triumph for Lopez Obrador and the party’s more strident wing, but Ortega refused to concede.

Each side has accused the other of election-tampering, including vote-buying, stealing and destroying ballots and stacking voter lists with nonmembers.

The controversy has been an embarrassment for Mexico’s main opposition party, which claimed fraud when Lopez Obrador lost the 2006 presidential election to Calderon by a paper-thin margin.

Since then, the PRD has been beset by internal tensions that grew during the hard-fought race for party leadership between Encinas and Ortega.

Alarmed by the infighting, party elder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas suggested that the PRD scrap the results of its vote and name an interim leader. But the two sides, each convinced it would win, have insisted on declaring a victor.

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ken.ellingwood@latimes.com