Mexico ruling party faces leftist rival in key state showdown

MEXICO CITY: Struggling to halt a run of electoral losses, Mexico’s ruling party squares off against its main leftist rival in a major state election that could prove a dry run for next year’s presidential contest.

President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party ( PRI) is battling to defend its biggest state bastion from the new party of veteran campaigner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has led early polls for the July 2018 presidential race.

In PRI hands since 1929, the State of Mexico home to one in eight Mexican voters, and if it falls to Lopez Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement ( Morena) it could provide him with a springboard to take the top job.

“It’s a pivotal election, not just for Morena, it’s a pivotal election for Mexico,” the two-time presidential runner-up said in a recent radio interview. “Imagine the message that will go out to the world (if Morena wins).”

Victory for the combative Lopez Obrador in 2018 could push Mexico in a more nationalist direction at a time of heightened tensions with the United States. President Donald Trump has riled Mexicans with threats to tear up a joint trade deal and build a border wall to keep out undocumented immigrants.

Opinion polls show Morena’s gubernatorial candidate for the State of Mexico, Delfina Gomez, running neck-and neck with PRI rival Alfredo del Mazo in the region of 16 million people that Pena Nieto himself once governed. — Reuters