MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mexico: A good day for PRI

Exit polls indicated that the party that governed Mexico for seven decades had won a strong victory yesterday in the country's largest state, the most important state race before next year's presidential elections.

While victories here in Mexico state and in the western state of Nayarit would bolster the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, it does not guarantee a return to the presidency it lost in 2000: its potential candidates all trail Mexico City Mayor Andrés López Obrador in the polls.

As polls closed, exit polls by national broadcasters Televisa, TV Azteca and Radio Centro showed the PRI's Enrique Peña Nieto with nearly half the vote in closely watched Mexico state race, with two rivals each 20 percentage points or more behind. The only other gubernatorial election before the July 2006 national vote is a September race in the mid-sized northern state of Coahuila ? where the PRI also is favoured to win.

Voting went largely peacefully in Mexico state, where turnout was about 50 percent ? but did not include electoral board president José Núñez Castañeda, who confessed to reporters he dropped out of a line with 300 people in front of him.

In Mexico state, whose shape melts around three sides of Mexico City, 38-year-old Peña Nieto has jumped within five years from political obscurity to the verge of one of Mexico's most prominent political jobs.

He does, however, have a political lineage: family ties to at least four past governors of the state. He has denied relationship with current Gov. Arturo Montiel, a fellow native of Atlacomulco city who backed Peña for the candidacy and is now seeking the presidency.

He ran a campaign heavy on promises of public works projects and light on ideology. Late polls showed Peña with a strong lead over Rubén Mendoza, of President Vicente Fox's National Action Party, and Yeidckol Polevnsky of López Obrador's left-leaning Democratic Revolution.

Former Tlalnepantla mayor Mendoza, 44, hurt himself when he was caught claiming falsely to have had a breakfast with Fox, as well as when he was filmed amid a mob raiding a truck of PRI promotional toys.

The Democratic Revolution candidate, a former business chamber leader, puzzled many when she acknowledged having changed her name from the very Mexican Citlali Ibáñez to something most Mexicans can barely pronounce.

The campaign, which leaned heavily on the popular López Obrador, was not helped when aides suggested UFOs were buzzing her rallies.