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Left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has
been elected president of Mexico with at least 53 per cent of the vote, the
electoral authority says.
A projection based on a vote count in 7,800
representative polling stations confirms the victory of Lopez Obrador, National
Electoral Institute President Lorenzo Cordova said.
Lopez Obrador took between 53 and 53.8 per cent of
the vote. Conservative-centrist Ricardo Anaya received up to 22.8 per cent,
while Jose Antonio Meade from outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto’s
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had up to 16.3 per cent.
The results make Obrador Mexico’s first presidential
candidate to receive more than 50 per cent of the vote since the PRI lost its
dominant position in the last century.
Voter turnout was estimated at 63 per cent of the 89
million eligible voters in the country’s biggest ever elections.
Voters were seen as having punished the PRI for a
string of corruption scandals, sluggish economic growth of only about 2 per
cent and the party’s perceived inefficiency in combating the country’s soaring
crime rate.
Pena Nieto, whose approval ratings stood at only
about 20 per cent, was limited by the constitution to a single term. Former
Mexico City mayor Obrador, who had already run for the presidency twice before,
cast himself as an anti-establishment candidate prepared to crack down on
corruption and to help the poor.
He has also pledged a less militarized, more social
approach to fighting crime, including an amnesty to lower-level gang members.
Mexico recorded about 29,000 killings last year, the
highest annual number since modern records started being kept two decades ago.
The electoral campaign was also overshadowed by
violence, with about 120 politicians assassinated over 10 months, according to
risk consultant Etellekt.
Criminal gangs committing such killings are believed
to seek influence on politics especially on the local level. A political
killing was reported even on election day.
An activist of the Labour Party was shot dead on
leaving her home in Contepec in western Michoacan state, the party was quoted
as saying. Lopez Obrador’s victory was expected by many to further worsen
Mexico’s already frosty relations with the U.S., whose president, Donald Trump,
has slammed the country over illegal migration and pressured it to pay for a
border wall.
Obrador has sought to placate fears that his victory
would turn Mexico into another Venezuela, which is suffering a severe economic
crisis under socialist rule.
In spite of lambasting the entrepreneurial elite as
“a rapacious minority,” he has excluded the possibility of expropriations and
pledged guarantees to investors.
Obrador’s popularity is attributed less to his
political programme than to a general desire to end the rule of the
corruption-tarnished PRI, which has governed the country intermittently since
1929.
