FOR weeks the Goliaths of Mexican politics bombarded the airwaves with advertisements so dreary they made you want to leave the country. So Mexicans were thrilled when political Davids, with almost no publicity and little money, triumphed in congressional and regional elections on June 7th. Independent candidates, allowed to run for the first time, profited from disillusionment with big parties. One trounced mainstream rivals in Nuevo León, a rich northern state. A candidate from a tiny protest party became mayor of the second-largest city, Guadalajara. Pedro Kumamoto, an unaffiliated 25-year-old, won a seat in a local legislature in central Mexico with a catchy Facebook campaign called “Yes, walls do fall down.”
The incumbent party lost in five out of nine elections for state governor. In the congressional races the share of the vote won by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the two other big parties fell 16 percentage points from the last mid-term elections held six years ago. A new left-wing party, Morena, picked up 8% of the vote, giving it mischief-making clout. Morena’s firebrand leader,...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1S7HGPr
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