Mexico & Nafta - July 2012 (ISSN 1741-444X)

Five new state governors, plus the mayor (cum governor) of the Mexico City Federal District (DF), will also be elected on 1 July.  As with the federal election, the traditional Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is set to make the most gains.

Voters in Jalisco, Guanajuato, Morelos, Tabasco and Yucatán will chose new governors on 1 July, with the southern state of Chiapas also due to elect a new governor a month later on 1 August.*(Correction: Chiapas held its gubernatorial elections on 1 July).

Of these races the federal district is the easiest one to call, if the polls are anything to go by. All the polls suggest that Miguel Ángel Mancera will be handily elected, retaining the DF for the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). Until 6 January this year Mancera was the DF’s attorney general under the incumbent mayor, Marcelo Ebrard. Though a popular mayor, Ebrard lost the 2012 PRD presidential nomination to Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is biding his time for the next contest. The PRD has run the capital since 1997, when elections to the federal district administration were first introduced, yet the PRD has never managed to build much of a platform outside the capital, currently running only there of Mexico’s 32 states; Chiapas, Guerrero and Michoacán. It may lose control of Chiapas in August to the PRI, whose candidate Manuel Velasco Coello has appeared ahead in recent polls. Notably, the PRI’s 2012 presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto is also ahead in Chiapas.

The federally-ruling Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) currently runs six states; the Baja Californias (North and South) and Sonora in the North, along with Jalisco, Guanajuato and Morelos in central Mexico. The PAN and the PRD also jointly administer Sinaloa, Puebla and Oaxaca.

The PRI, meanwhile, is dominant at the state level, running 18 states: Aguascalientes, Campeche, Chihuahua,  Coahuila, Durango, Hidalgo, Estado de México (Estado), Nayarit, Nuevo León, Querétaro, Quintana Roo, San Luis Potosí, Tabasco, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Veracruz, Yucatán and Zacatecas. Given that some pollsters expect the PRI to potentially win a simple majority in both houses of the federal parliament, which will also hold elections on 1 July, the PRI’s ‘reconquista’ of Mexico will be all but complete (see sidebar).

The PAN is expected to retain control of the conservative Guanajuato, while Tabasco and Yucatán are traditional PRI strongholds.

However, polls suggest that the PAN may lose Morelos (south of Mexico City), which it has run since 2000, when it also won federal office for the first time in just over seven decades. According to data from local pollster, Mitofsky, published on 25 June, the PRI’s Amado Orihuela Trejo is polling in first place in the governor’s race with 35% of voting intentions, followed by Graco Ramírez Garrido of the PRD on 30%, with the PAN’s Adrián Rivera Pérez trailing on 16%. Some 18% were undecided. Eliminating these, the PRI candidate is on 43%, way ahead of his rivals.

Jalisco is Mexico’s fourth-biggest state (or fifth including the federal district) and the state capital Guadalajara is the country’s second-biggest city. The PAN has run the state since 1995.  However the PRI hopes to unseat the PAN with its candidate Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz, who according to a late June poll by El Universal, had nearly half (49.3%) of voting intentions.  The PAN’'s Fernando Guzmán Pérez Peláez was in second place with 29.3%, with the PRD’s Fernando Garza Martínez in third with 12.7%.

• And congress too

According to the final Mitofsky poll (published on 26 June) the PRI and its allies look set to have between 274 and 304 federal deputies in the 500-seat chamber of deputies and between 66 and 73 seats in the 128-seat senate.