Mexico City – After dominating Mexican politics for 71 years, until Vicente Fox was elected president in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party finds itself in disarray coming into the July 2 presidential election.
Party candidate Roberto Madrazo remains far behind conservative Felipe Calderon and left-of-center candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in recent polls.
Now, the party, known by the Spanish acronym PRI, has several of its own senior members calling for voters to cast ballots for Lopez Obrador rather than Madrazo, making a PRI comeback even less likely than it already was.
Madrazo, a 53-year-old former congressman, senator and state governor, spent the U.S. equivalent of $11.5 million on advertising from Jan. 19 to March 15, outpacing any of the other campaigns.
Most of the money, about $9.2 million, went toward television ads.
But despite the advertising, polls show Calderon, of Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, ahead with 39 percent of the vote. Lopez Obrador, of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, holds 35 percent.
Madrazo remains a distant third with about 22 percent.
That lag in the polls has some, including PRI Sen. Manuel Bartlett, asking party supporters during the past few days to vote for Lopez Obrador rather than Madrazo. To Bartlett and others, casting a ballot for Lopez Obrador serves as the “useful vote,” blocking the conservative Calderon from taking the presidency.
On Monday, PRI officials began the formal process of expelling Bartlett and others from the party. Speaking at a campaign event Monday, Madrazo brushed aside any idea that the intra-party politics would affect his campaign.
“I will get the loyal vote,” he said, according to a transcript. “With them we are going to win and we will complement the loyal vote with a good part of the indecisive vote because … this is atypical, this is not the normal electoral process.”
