Mexico & Nafta - March 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The BCS election was not what it appeared: a thumping win for President Felipe Calderón's Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). The triumph of the PAN candidate for governor, Marcos Covarrubias Villaseñor, was the result of a split in the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), which has run BCS since 1999.

Infighting inside the PRD meant that Covarrubias, a PRD federal deputy until last October, did not get the nomination for the governorship. As a result both the PRI and the PAN courted him. Such is Covarrubias's pull at the ballot box that the PAN ended up with nine of the 16 deputies in the state congress. The PRD was marginalised, though it did manage to hang on to the mayorship of the state capital, Los Cabos.

The results in the two 2011 elections so far, Guerrero and BCS, show that the PRI is not the political steamroller its hierarchy assumed  it would be this year. Some political commentators are already counting out the PRD, arguing that its crushing defeat in BCS shows that it has no future. The second strand of this argument is that the PRD was not really a winner in Guerrero because its candidate was a (perhaps only temporary) defector from the PRI.

Election budget. A congressional committee has called on the financial controller at the independent Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), the agency which runs elections, to explain what the IFE had done with the budget it did not spend in 2010. The IFE has retained the underspend (of M$348m, or US$28.5m) and put it into a building modernisation fund, rather than returning the money to the national treasury. It is not clear whether congress, in the form of the chamber of deputies, has the power to compel officials of the IFE to testify. Currently the congressional audit commission is inviting the IFE's financial controller, Gregorio Guerrero Pozas, to present his side of the case.

• It is worth noting that turnout in the BCS election was, as it had also been in Guerrero, more-than-respectable at 61%. This suggests that voters still believe that their votes matter.