Mexican presidential race kicks off with nominations

Mexico City, Mexico | AFP | The campaign for Mexico’s July 1 presidential election began in earnest Sunday as the country’s top parties officially nominated their candidates, with all three front-runners trying to sell a message of change.

It is still a wide-open race to succeed President Enrique Pena Nieto, who is deeply unpopular heading into the final stretch of his six-year term in a Mexico beset by endless corruption scandals and record levels of violent crime.

The candidate to beat is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, a fiery leftist who has tried to present a mellower image this time around, and who has taken a growing lead in the polls.

In second place is Ricardo Anaya of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), a youthful ex-lawmaker whose bid to campaign as a fresh face has been hurt by allegations of corruption and strong-arming his way to his party’s nomination.

Rounding out the top three is respected former finance minister Jose Antonio Meade, standing for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — a long-dominant force in Mexican politics whose popularity is now so low it tapped a non-party member to be its presidential candidate for the first time in its history.

Lopez Obrador, a two-time presidential runner-up whose critics hate him as fervently as his supporters love him, promised sweeping change for Mexico as he accepted his Morena party’s nomination

He vowed to overhaul public health and education, end the privatization of state resources and improve life for the poor.

But — sensitive to critics’ accusations of an authoritarian style — he vowed that “nothing will be imposed from above.”

“I’m aware of my historic responsibility. I want to be remembered as a good president,” he told cheering supporters in Mexico City, going for a presidential look in a dark suit and red tie.

He vowed to be relentless fighting the graft festering in the Mexican political system.

“I’m stubborn. It’s a well-known fact,” he said.

“With that same conviction, I will act as president… stubbornly, obstinately, persistently, bordering on craziness, to wipe out corruption.”

– Deep divisions –

Anaya, 38, and Meade, 48, are fighting tooth and nail for the anti-AMLO vote, each hoping it will propel them to victory.

Both have struck sometimes awkward alliances with smaller parties.

Recent polls give Lopez Obrador just over 30 percent of the vote, with Anaya in the 20s and Meade in the teens — enough for Lopez Obrador to win in Mexico’s first-past-the-post system.

He’s the clear choice for change, a former Mexico City mayor famous for railing against the country’s “mafia of power.”