Mexico's PRI sweeps up in state races

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) made sweeping political gains in Sunday's elections in three states - including the key region around the capital - in victories that are being seen as a major comeback for an organization that had ruled the country for 71 years.

Voters elected PRI governors in Coahuila and Nayarit, giving the historic party control in 19 of Mexico's 32 states. However, the party's biggest win occurred in Mexico state where Eruviel Ávila captured the governorship with more than 60 percent of the vote. The state's outgoing 44-year-old governor, Enrique Peña Nieto, also of the PRI, is widely expected to run next year for president.

Polls show that Peña Nieto is highly popular and Sunday's results reflect Mexicans' unhappiness with soaring narco-violence that has left more than 40,000 dead since 2006.

Voters are also frustrated by the incapability of President Felipe Calderón's government to break the cartels' grip on the country's northern states, where they wage deadly battles with each other for control of the profitable drug routes to the United States.

With eyes on the 2012 elections, the PRI has found a candidate who comes across well in the media and is considered to be politically capable of taking the reins of the Mexican presidency.

The National Action Party (PAN), of which Calderón is a member, took away the PRI's hold on Mexico's presidential franchise in 2000 when Vicente Fox was the victor. The PRI has not been able to regain power since, and many observers thought the party could never return to power in Mexico. But some now see Sunday's electoral results as confirmation of a PRI comeback.

The PAN and the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), which has been divided since the last 2006 election, have yet to produce any strong contenders for next year's race.

Looking to blame

Following Ávila's win, PRD state leaders began blaming party leader and former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador for their painful loss. They wanted López Obrador to form an alliance with the conservative PAN to stop the PRI from retaining control of Mexico state but he refused. If the PRD and PAN had not formed similar alliances in Puebla and Sinaloa last year, the PRI would have won those states too.