Mexico & Nafta - 14 September 2004

The Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) appealed to the governor of Veracruz, Miguel Alemán Velasco, to overturn the result of the election for governor of 5 September. The PAN is also certain to lodge a formal appeal against the result.

The Veracruz election is the most important of this year's 14 state and municipal elections. Veracruz is the third most important state in Mexico in terms of congressional representation and thus will be a key battleground in the 2006 presidential and congressional elections. The virtual three-way split indicates that whoever is elected president in 2006 will not have obtained anything like a majority of the votes in the presidential election and will also have to face negotiating with a congress which will be divided between the three main parties. President Vicente Fox has faced this position throughout his tenure and it has flummoxed him.

The PRI, which has never lost control of the state, was expected to hold the state reasonably easily. This was not what happened. If it won, it won only narrowly. Such as result is a poor one for the president of the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, who is close to Fidel Herrera, the PRI senator who was the party's candidate. One factor in the election was the split in the PRI: Miguel Yunes, one of the chief lieutenants in the lower chamber of congress of Elba Esther Gordillo, the PRI's number two and declared rival to Madrazo, came out strongly against Herrera. Gordillo herself was more circumspect, unlike her behaviour in the Oaxaca and Aguascalientes elections where she supported the candidate most likely to beat the Prií­sta. Her caution was due to her political friendship with Herrera. 

The final results put Herrera, running for the Fidelidad por Veracruz alliance (essentially PRI-Partido Verde Ecologista de México combo) 26,000 votes ahead of the candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional, Gerardo Buganza. The worrying point is that spolit, and thus ineligible, ballot papers were over 80,000. This is more than three times the margin of victory. 

The third candidate was Dante Delgado, a former PRI governor, now the founder of a leftwing party, Convergencia, and candidate for an alliance (Unidos por Veracruz) composed of his party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática and the Partido del Trabajo, running a reasonably close third.

Both the PAN and the PRD-Convergencia claim that the state electoral authority is in the pocket of the PRI, which has controlled the state since the Mexican Revolution. They point out that the Instituto Electoral Veracruzano (IEV) did nothing to stop Herrera himself, and the leader of his main ally, the Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico, broadcasting appeals for support on the eve of the election. By law, all campaigns have to finish at least three days before polling day in order to promote a period of reflection. 

The count
As soon as the polls closed in Veracruz, both Herrera and Buganza claimed to have won. One of the two exit polls and the official count reported that the election was too close to call. Early opinion polls in the campaign had put Fidel Herrera, well ahead of his two challengers. As the election campaign wore on, the polls showed Buganza closing on Herrera. 

The state electoral authority had expected to produce results less than seven hours after the polls closed but did not produce a final preliminary result until 9 September. Yet as the count proceeded early on 6 September it became increasingly clear that Herrera had more votes than Buganza. Whether this reflected what the voters actually did is not as clear. Formally, Herrera is running for the Fidelidad por Veracruz alliance. This is composed of the PRI, the PVEM, and a local party, the Partido Revolucionario Veracruzano. 

Herrera said that that his party's polls had shown that it was four points ahead; the PAN claimed a two point advantage. The Televisa exit poll, which is particularly significant because Miguel Alemán, the current (PRI) governor of the state was a founding shareholder in the broadcasting company, also reported that the election was too close to call. The exit poll for the rival broadcaster, TV Azteca said that Herrera had won by 39% to 35% with Delgado on 26%. The TV Azteca exit poll came from Mendoza Blanco y Asociados, while Televisa's poll was from Mitofsky, generally reckoned to be the country's most reliable pollster.

Approximately 4.6m people were eligible to vote in the election. Eyewitnesses reported that the turnout was high; in fact it was over 60%, the highest for any state election this year. There were 8,766 ballot boxes to count. The PAN is already grumbling that the ballot may have been fiddled after polling closed: it claims that there is a close friendship between Herrera and the president of the Instituto Electoral Veracruzano, Salvador Martí­nez. Apart from the governor, voters were also electing 30 first-past-the-post congressional representatives and 212 mayors. 

The PAN claims to have won at least 14 of the 30 first past the post seats, though some of the races are subject to review. The PRI-PVEM alliance won 13 and Unidos por Veracruz three. The PAN will probably be the biggest single party in the state congress, though it will not have an absolute majority. The remaining 20 seats in the state congress will be awarded proportionally. The PAN will pick up a third of these seats, while the other seats will be split between the parties which went into the electoral alliances. It seems likely that Delgado's Convergencia will hold the balance of power in the state congress. 

The municipal elections were also a setback for Madrazo and the PRI. The party lost control of 41 municipalities, holding only 71. The PAN won 89 municipalities and was strongest in the oil zone in the south, Veracruz itself and in the ranching district in the north of the state. 

Unidos por Veracruz won 40 municipalities, notably the state capital, Xalapa and the PRI's ally the PRV 12.

• The loser of the equally close gubernatorial election for the neighbouring state of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué, from the PAN-PRD alliance, Todos Somos Oaxaca, appealed to the state authorities to overturn the result of the 1 August election. He claimed that the state electoral authorities took only two hours to investigate and reject 632 denunciations of irregularities. 
• If the elections in Veracruz and Oaxaca are ordered to be re-run it is likely that the PRI will win them. In the two previous cases during the Fox administration when state election results were annulled because of irregularities, in Tabasco and Colima, the PRI won the reruns: it had also won the original elections. 
• The PRD dropped the current governor's wife, Maricarmen Ramí­rez, as its candidate for the governorship of the state of Tlaxcala. It has picked Gelasio Montiel. Maricarmen maintains that she will still run. The current governor, Alfonso Sánchez Anaya, is a defector from the PRI and is not popular in the state. The election is in the next round of state elections in November. Montiel will also be running for Convergencia.