PRI wins Michoacan governorship

With 99.32 percent of the ballots counted, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Fausto Vallejo looks set to win the Michoacan state elections.

As of Monday at 10.30 a.m., Vallejo leads with 35.38 percent of the vote, to National Action Party (PAN) candidate Luisa Maria Calderon’s 32.68 percent, according to the Preliminary Electoral Results Program (PREP). The electoral authority plans to disseminate the final count on Wednesday.

The result comes as a big blow to the PAN ahead of the 2012 general elections, with momentum now swinging firmly behind the resurgent PRI, which ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000.

Michoacan is President Felipe Calderon’s home state and his sister Luisa Maria Calderon had been widely tipped to win the November election. A fortnight ago most voter opinion polls gave Calderon a healthy lead of six to eleven points.

The elections were carried out amid a climate of violence and intimidation, with La Piedad Mayor Ricardo Guzman Romero shot dead while campaigning on behalf of Calderon on November 2.

The outcome is also a bitter disappointment for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), for whom Michoacan has traditionally been considered a party stronghold. Headed by Silvano Aureoles, the PRD, Labor Party (PT) and Citizens Movement (Convergence) alliance received just 28.88 percent of the vote.