Peña Nieto Savors Long-Plotted Victory in Mexico Josh Haner/The New York Times President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, center, held a news conference in Mexico City on Monday. He has said he caught the political bug in elementary school. MEXICO CITY - He carried a briefcase in high school while his classmates were slinging backpacks. He rose up from a low-level functionary to become a powerful governor through the same attention to strategy he applies while playing chess. Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico's president-elect, is as political an animal as they come, although he is an unknown quantity too, one with a smooth tongue and good looks even men compliment. When his campaign was asked whom he considers his close friends, aides responded with a Davos dinner party-like list of political power brokers and opinion makers whom he had met in the past year. None said they knew him well, but all spoke favorably. A few, indeed, he had met months before at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. "He was interested in how others won in campaigns in other countries," said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Group, the world's largest advertising company, who was on the list and had met Mr. Peña Nieto at Davos in January for a wide-ranging chat arranged by intermediaries. Now those political skills will face a crucial test as he answers the big question in Mexico: whether he represents the old ways of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, marked by cronyism, or a new, more humbled version of it, as he has reassured voters during the campaign. At the same time, Washington is waiting to hear more about Mr. Peña Nieto's position on the drug war raging across Mexico. He has spoken of his desire to reduce the bloodshed that has characterized President Felipe Calderón's assault on traffickers, but he has also vowed to steer clear of the pacts with organized crime that were a part of the old era of the party, known as the PRI. "The fight against crime will continue," he said Sunday night as early results put him ahead of his two main rivals. Yes, with a new strategy to reduce violence and protect, above all, the lives of Mexicans. In the face of organized crime, there will be neither negotiation, nor truce. The campaign has worked aggressively to rebut any impression he would go easy on drug cartels, quickly sending aides, for example, to meet with Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican, after he told a House hearing last month that PRI had turned a blind eye to the issue in the past. For all his careful plotting, Mr. Peña Nieto has his share of slips, often when he veers from a script, and he focuses more on the delivery than the message. He is not one to deeply study issues and, in a campaign gaffe last year at a book fair, could not name three books that influenced him (and still could not in an interview with The New York Times six months later). "He is not a policy wonk," said Javier Treviño, a party stalwart who managed his campaign in Nuevo León State. But he relishes political tactics and is a passionate chess player who once delayed a strategy meeting to complete a match. Years ago, when he was an unknown state official, Mr. Peña Nieto showed that no detail was too small for him in his climb up the political ladder, not even the not-so-minor matter of delivering escamoles, a dish of ant eggs considered a delicacy, 4,600 miles to the president of Argentina. A delegation from Mexico State had decided to surprise President Carlos Menem with the dish, and it fell on Mr. Peña Nieto, who was back in Mexico, to get it down there, and quickly, no matter the customs hurdles. "How he did it, I don't know," recalled César Camacho, who was governor at the time. But they were on time. Washington insiders whom Mr. Peña Nieto met with during visits to the United States in recent months said he pumped them for details of the American presidential race, though he was careful not to betray a preference. He has not met President Obama, who called to congratulate him on Monday, but is said to have admired his 2008 campaign and borrowed some of the tactics, including a heavy use of social media. The PRI's own campaign tactics remain a source of ire, with allegations of fraud and spending violations; young people demonstrated Monday and the runner-up, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said he would not concede and would challenge the results. Mr. Peña Nieto defends the PRI, which was unceremoniously dumped by voters in 2000, in the first real democratic elections here, ending 71 years of rule that had given the country political stability and lasting social programs but had enriched party cronies, stifled political dissent and so permeated government ranks and institutions, historians have written, that its control often extended to crime bosses.