Mexico: the ruling party wins a historic election one year before the presidential election

Mexico's ruling leftist party consolidated its hegemony by winning a historic election Sunday in the country's most populous state, just over a year before the next presidential election. The Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) has wrested the post of governor in the state of Mexico, on the outskirts of the capital, a bastion for more than 90 years of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has long reigned unchallenged over the country's political life.

Buoyed by the popularity of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Morena's candidate, Delfina Gomez, is nine points ahead of her PRI rival Alejandra del Moral, according to the first partial results of the National Electoral Institute (INE). "You have decided that it is time for the process of transformation that our country is going through to take root in our state," said Delfina Gomez, a 60-year-old teacher who leads a coalition called "Together We Make History."

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This is the time for change," said Jorge Alvarado, a 50-year-old shoeshine boy and supporter of the Morena party, which tries to reduce social inequality. The PRI candidate acknowledged her opponent's "triumph" in a brief statement. The PRI stood in alliance with the PAN (liberal right) and the PRD (centre-left) mainly.

New hegemony

With this victory, Lopez Obrador's movement confirms its new hegemony just over a year before the presidential election scheduled for mid-2024. Coming to head the federal presidency in 2018, Morena governs 22 of the 32 states of the federation, alone or with his allies, not counting Sunday's election.

The issue now is who will represent Morena in the 2024 presidential election to try to take over from Lopez Obrador, who is limited by the Constitution to a single six-year term and who will therefore not be able to run again.

Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum are the frontrunners in an internal primary set to begin in the coming weeks. With his victory in the historic stronghold of the PRI, Morena also confirms the decline of the former all-powerful party, which had governed Mexico unchallenged from 1930 to 2000, and again from 2012 to 2018.

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"Mini-Republic"

The PRI, which in the past won every election, had been described as a "perfect dictatorship" by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. A total of 12.6 million voters were registered for Sunday's election, with a turnout of between 48.7 and 50.2 percent, according to partial INE results.

With 17 million inhabitants – as many as the Netherlands, more than Quebec or Belgium – the State of Mexico sums up all the contrasts of the country, like a "mini-Republic", according to political scientist Miguel Tovar of the firm Alterpraxis.

The state is one of the most violent in the country, especially in the cities adjacent to the capital, which is gentrifying in places, while having an important industrial fabric (Ford, Nestlé). Its economy accounts for 9.1% of the national GDP. Elections were also held on Sunday in the northern mining state of Coahuila.

The PRI would retain control of this state bordering the United States, with 57% of the vote for its candidate Manolo Jimenez, according to partial results of the INE. Morena ran in dispersed order with the dissident candidacy of a former secretary of state in the government of Lopez Obrador.