Until the end, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will have thrown away its entire electoral machine to try to save what had been its bulwark for ninety-four years, during the election of the governor of the state of Mexico, the most populous in the country (12.7 million voters), which took place on Sunday 4 June.
Throughout the weekend, images of alleged purchases of votes in exchange for money or gifts – about twenty of which have already been investigated by the special prosecutor’s office on electoral crimes – occupied social media and the media. But these maneuvers, which the PRI has often used and abused, have not changed the result: Delfina Gomez, the candidate of the presidential Morena party (National Regeneration Movement, left), has won, as everyone predicted, the polls for several months .
“PRI hegemony wiped out”
According to preliminary results from the Electoral Institute of the State of Mexico, she obtained 53.3% of the votes, against 43.7% for her PRI opponent, Alejandra del Moral. ” This defeat confirms the disastrous image of the PRI in public opinion and demonstrates that after five years in power Morena has literally swept away the hegemony of the PRI, which still governed the majority of states in 2017 and today governs only two. », estimates the political scientist Carlos Bravo Regidor.
The seventeen million inhabitants of this state will, for the first time, be governed by the left and by a woman, moreover of very modest origins. Delfina Gomez, 60, was a teacher and then principal for almost thirty years in her hometown of Texcoco, before entering politics and becoming mayor in 2013, already alongside Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as “AMLO”), the current president of Mexico, then a member of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD).
Later elected deputy, she had already tried, in 2017, to become governor of her state during an electoral campaign where the future president had accompanied her everywhere, while preparing the 2018 presidential elections. The winner, Alfredo del Mazo, cousin of the former -President Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI), son and grandson of former governors of this state, was still a representative of this political caste that seemed immovable. But, already, Delfina Gomez’s good score (30.7% of the vote, against the PRI’s 33.5%) showed a noticeable decline in the influence of the PRI, and she announced the victory the following year for the left to the presidency.
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