The Economist: Mexico's Election, The PRI is Back!

Enrique Pena Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is on course to become the next president of Mexico. An official "rapid count" of ballots just before midnight following Sunday's election gave him a projected lead of between 6% and 7.7% over his closest rival. Felipe Calderon, the outgoing president and member of the rival National Action Party, or PAN, congratulated Mr Pena on his victory late on Sunday evening, and the PAN's candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota, conceded, but Mr Pena's closest challenger, the left-wing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said he would wait for the final results, which are expected on Monday evening. Nearly all pollsters had expected Mr Pena to win. The projected result, however, is closer than most predicted. Surveys had given Mr Pena a lead of between ten and 15 percentage points. If the projected results of the presidential race are mirrored in the congressional elections, which was held on the same day, the PRI is likely to be the biggest party in both houses. Still it may fall short of the absolute majority for which it had hoped. A complicated voting system, involving elements of first-past-the-post and proportional representation, means that the composition of the legislature will not be known until late on Monday. The return of the PRI is not welcomed by everyone. The party ran Mexico for seven uninterrupted decades until it was ousted from the presidency in 2000. Back then few expected that the "perfect dictatorship", as the PRI regime was dubbed by the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, would would return to power just 12 years later.