Mexico ruling party has preliminary lead in key state vote

Mexico City: A quick-count sampling of votes for governor of Mexico's most populous state gave a slight advantage to the candidate of President Enrique Pena Nieto's ruling party in a race seen as a key test ahead of next year's presidential election.

Officials said the preliminary results announced late Sunday indicated Alfredo del Mazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was likely to win between 32.75 per cent and 33.59 per cent of the ballots in the State of Mexico, compared with 30.73 per cent to 31.53 per cent for his closest rival, Delfina Gomez of the leftist Morena party.

Pedro Zamudio, president of the state's Electoral Institute, said the forecast was based on representative sampling of voting stations that has 95 per cent certainty but he also cautioned that the results of the election would not be until all the ballots were counted.

An official running tally early Monday had Gomez and del Mazo both with around 32 per cent of the vote, with about 41 per cent of the ballots tabulated.

A PRI victory would hand the party a much-needed win as the president's approval ratings have dipped near single digits ahead of the 2018 race for the nation's top office, which Pena Nieto cannot contest.

But losing a state it has governed without interruption for 88 years would be a devastating blow a year after it lost in several other states it had also always dominated.

Political analyst Raymundo Riva Palacio said even a narrow, "pyrrhic" PRI victory in the State of Mexico could spell trouble for the party next year. 

Considering the power of the PRI's political machine in the state and the fact that Gomez was practically unknown eight months ago, the result so far signals "an enormous discontent with the PRI" and portends a "very bad scenario" for the party and the president, he argued.

"I don't have the slightest doubt that today there was a qualitative change in the electorate," Riva Palacio said.

The other two main parties, the leftist Democratic Revolution and the conservative National Action, were behind in the state by significant margins.

Even before the quick-count results were announced, del Mazo and Gomez both proclaimed victory, something that happens commonly in Mexico.

"We are triumphing," del Mazo told supporters in the evening.

Gomez tweeted: "We won the election. Hope triumphed in the State of Mexico, I will not let you down." Morena leaders argued that the two top candidates were essentially in a statistical tie.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the standard-bearer of the Morena party, promptly rejected the quick count as a product of the "mafia of power" and urged supporters to gather electoral evidence to prove that Gomez won.

"We are in the right," Lopez Obrador said in brief televised remarks. "Delfina won, and we are going to prove it. We will not accept any electoral fraud. ... Mexico needs democracy."