OUTSIDE CANDIDATES CAN RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN MEXICO
Mexico City, Aug. 13: Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Saturday endorsed a change to the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s rules that allows outsiders to run for President, a move that gives the embattled leader greaterpower to anoint his successor.
Gathering for their National Assembly ahead of the 2018 election, members of the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party, voted torelax
requirements for presidential candidates, jettisoning a rule that nominees must be party members with at least 10 years standing.
The change opens the door to the candidacy of PenaNieto’s finance minister, Jose Antonio Meade, a soft-spokentechnocrat who has served in various cabinet posts under boththe PRI and the conservative National Action Party.
Pena Nieto made his way to the stage at a leisurely pace,spending 15 minutes greeting and posing for photographs with supporters in the crowd of more than 15,000 in Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes.
Pena Nieto echoed PRI leaders in describing the change as a move toward building a modern and more inclusive party.
Updating the party’s statutes “opens us up to society and brings us closer to citizens,” he said. “And it also strengthens the PRI as the best platform so that members and sympathisers can serve their community.”