Election results Monday showed that Mexico’s ruling party had retained two state governorships, indicating renewed strength ahead of next year’s presidential races.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, in power since 1929 and known as PRI, has won 10 of 14 gubernatorial races in the past year although it lost control of the congress in 1997.
But more and more, the party is winning with sharply reduced margins, as it did Sunday in the Caribbean coastal state of Quintana Roo and the central state of Hidalgo.
In Quintana Roo, where tourist resorts such as Cancun overshadow Indian villages, opposition parties split about 56 percent of the vote, while the PRI won the statehouse with more than 43 percent. PRI captured 54 percent of the presidential vote in 1994.
In Hidalgo, PRI took the governorship with about 50 percent of the vote, a decrease of 10 percentage points from 1994.
