Mexico's new middle class shakes up poll Frontrunner: Enrique Peña Nieto holds his final campaign rally in Mexico City At the back of the Mega supermarket in Iztapalapa, a poor and sometimes edgy neighbourhood on Mexico City's south-eastern fringes, Claudio Hernández and Rebeca Valdés are comparing prices on two shiny washing machines - each one available with interest-free credit over 12 months. "The last time we bought one of these, we had to save for months and months," says Mr Hernández, 50. There was no such thing as interest-free credit back then. Thanks to many years of low interest rates and low inflation, the couple are using loans and their increased discretionary spending power to gather the accoutrements of 21st century living. Like millions of other Mexicans who have joined the middle classes over the past decade or more, they have become modern consumers. "It's such a good month for offers," says Mr Hernández, who has just come from Walmart up the road. We could never have afforded this before. Theirs is a story repeated throughout the emerging world. In Mexico, where an estimated 80m people are eligible to choose a new president on Sunday, these new middle-class habits and aspirations have fragmented traditional voting patterns and, perhaps, also dissolved traditional class allegiances. "Far fewer Mexicans identify with political parties nowadays," says Luis Rubio of CIDAC, a think-tank. It's a symptom of the growing middle classes. Even voting intentions among the country's business leaders have splintered. Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, is thought to be sympathetic towards Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftwing leader. Others divide their support between Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the ruling conservative National Action Party (PAN). The change is very recent. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Mexican middle class and the companies where they worked were a government creation. The PRI, which ruled for 71 uninterrupted years until 2000 in what Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, called "the perfect dictatorship," created millions of unionised and benefit-stuffed jobs for the country's growing urban population. All they had to do in return was provide unrelenting political support. Ciudad Madero is a living relic of those times. The roughly 200,000 residents of this steamy oil town, a union stronghold of Pemex, the state-owned oil company, live in small, neat homes with cars parked in suburban driveways. But the privatisations of the past 20 years have led to a steady withdrawal of the government from the economy and the state-sponsored lifestyle of places such as Ciudad Madero has been diluted by the emergence of a "new" Mexican middle class. All of this has changed the Mexican political game. Promises by the fiery Mr López Obrador to shake up the system have scared many members of this new middle class. Rising levels of home-ownership - Infonavit, a government agency, financed 796,000 home loans in 2010, compared with 101,000 in 1990 - mean that many of them prefer stability to revolution. Having narrowly lost in 2006, Mr Lopez Obrador now trails a distant second in the polls. At the same time, however, Mexico's new middle class puts a greater premium on economic growth. "Lack of economic growth in general limits opportunities and social mobility," says Luis de la Calle, an economist in Mexico City. That helps explain why Ms Vázquez Mota of the PAN has failed to ignite voter passions. During the past 12 years of PAN rule, Mexico's economy notched up a mediocre annual expansion of about 2 per cent compared with 3 per cent in the rest of Latin America. According to most polls, Ms Vázquez Mota languishes in third place. That has left the PRI's Mr Peña Nieto to sweep the table. Despite worries that a return of the PRI would undermine Mexico's fledgling democracy, his business-friendly approach appeals to Mexicans yearnings for more economic dynamism. One in six Mexicans who intend to vote say they could change their mind on the day, according to Consulta Mitofsky, the polling group. They are another sign of the new Mexico. "Such voters are generally educated, urban and between 30 and 50," says Mitofsky's Roy Campos. They are politically aware and vote rationally. Both Mr Hernández and Ms Valdés intend to vote on Sunday. But they say that they are no longer bound by their parents" allegiances. Mr Hernández takes a last look at the washing machines. "Times certainly have changed," he says.