Leftist Party Gains in Mexico State Election

The leftist Democratic Revolution Party and its presidential candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, emerged as the big winners Monday in a key state election, the last big political test before the Mexican presidential balloting in July.

The party, known in Spanish as the PRD, made substantial gains in the state of Mexico’s legislature. The increase came at the expense of both the Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI, and President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN. The PRI is expected to retain the largest number of seats in the legislature, according to election projections, but by a slim margin.

In the weeks before the vote Sunday in Mexico state, Lopez Obrador campaigned extensively for his party’s candidates.

The PRD also won the biggest prize of all: the mayor’s race in Ecatepec, a sprawling industrial suburb of Mexico City with 1 million voters. The victory ended years of PRI rule in the suburb, one of the largest municipalities in the nation.

The election results came as a new poll by the influential El Universal newspaper showed Lopez Obrador widening his lead in the presidential race to 10 percentage points over Felipe Calderon of the center-right PAN, the nation’s third major party.

Roberto Madrazo of the PRI was 18 points behind his PRD rival in the poll.

“At this point in the race, with the PAN and PRI candidates seemingly stuck, you have to ask if it’s possible for them to catch the PRD,” Leo Zuckermann, a political analyst, wrote in a survey of the poll results.

In February, Lopez Obrador led his PAN and PRI rivals in the El Universal poll by five and 14 percentage points respectively. Other recent polls also show him with substantial leads.

“It’s going to be very difficult for them to bring us down,” Lopez Obrador said Monday on his daily television program here. “This is the struggle of a people against a small group of leaders who have ruined Mexico.... We will win by a large margin.”

Lopez Obrador, 53, is popular among working-class Mexicans for a number of social programs and public works projects he launched during his five-year tenure as mayor of Mexico City, which ended last year.

In Mexico state, a horseshoe-shaped territory around the nation’s capital, Lopez Obrador addressed campaign rallies in 43 municipalities this month. In about a dozen of those cities and towns, his party’s candidates unseated the PRI.

Dan Lund, president of the Mexico City-based marketing and opinion research firm Mund Americas, said exit polls in Mexico state showed the leftist party did best in municipalities visited by their presidential candidate.

Much like Bill Clinton did in the United States in 1992, Lopez Obrador is pulling ahead of his rivals because he has strong support among women voters, Lund said. Traditionally, leftist candidates in Mexico have not done well among women. Meanwhile, the allegations of corruption involving the PRI and its presidential candidate have caused Madrazo to lose the support of women voters.

“Some people are saying that there is now a strong probability Lopez Obrador will be the winner,” Lund said. “I think that’s premature. But the evidence is accumulating. It’s hard to think how Calderon and Madrazo will overcome their problems.”

Pollsters such as Lund point out that Lopez Obrador remains significantly more popular than his party. But the candidate’s coattails helped his party make significant gains in the Mexico state elections, they said.

The PRD, which had been the third-largest party in the state legislature, moved into a virtual first-place tie with the PRI. The PAN slipped to third, a big setback.

Fox won Mexico state in 2000 on his way to becoming the first Mexican president in seven decades who was not from the PRI.

Arturo Garcia Portillo, a spokesman for the PAN, tried to put the best face on the state results. “It’s clear that the candidate of the PRD has a high level of support, but this hasn’t helped the PRD raise up a weak party structure,” he said.

Since January, the PAN’s Calderon has outspent both his rivals in the presidential race by a large margin in television advertising. But he has failed to cut into Lopez Obrador’s lead.

In recent weeks, Lopez Obrador’s rivals have attacked him for agreeing to only one televised debate. And on Friday, Calderon said he had received evidence that Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, a bete noire of the Bush administration, was funding Mexico university groups that support the front-runner.

For his part, Lopez Obrador continued to strike populist tones on the campaign trail.

At a rally Sunday he repeated his pledge to reevaluate the North American Free Trade Agreement among the U.S., Canada and Mexico “because we’re not going to allow this country to be flooded with foreign goods.”