PRI Lawmaker in Tabasco Made Acting Governor

In one of its final acts, the outgoing congress in Tabasco state named a former ruling party legislator as acting governor Sunday, two days after a top court stripped the party of its recently won governorship.

The naming of Enrique Priego, 53, came amid protests from opposition parties, which won a major victory Friday when Mexico’s top electoral court annulled the results of the gulf coast state’s October elections, backing opposition claims that the balloting was marred with errors.

The Federal Electoral Tribunal’s unprecedented ruling deprived the struggling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, of the only governorship it had won since losing a presidential election in July after 71 years in power.

Opposition leaders said the new congress, rather than the outgoing PRI-dominated legislature, should have picked the acting governor. The PRI does not have an absolute majority in the new congress, which took power after the acting governor was named Sunday.

Opposition parties also opposed a surprise constitutional amendment made by the outgoing legislature Saturday that tripled the time the acting governor has to call a new vote--a move seen as a bid by the PRI to keep an opposition figure out of the chief executive’s office in the oil-rich state.

In his first declarations as acting governor, Priego vowed to promote electoral reforms to ensure clean elections, saying he is “not afraid” of a rematch. He did not say when he planned to call a new vote.

Leaders of President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, which narrowly lost the race, protested the legislature’s decision to allow Priego to delay calling a rematch for 18 months.