Peña Nieto: Mexicans have given our party a second chance Enrique Peña Nieto moved to reassure the student movement, saying: 'I understand your complaints.' Photograph: Guillermo Arias/Xinhua Press/Corbis The party that governed Mexico for 71 years, until its reputation for coercion, corruption, economic mismanagement, and vote-rigging finally forced it out of power in 2000, has claimed an emphatic election victory behind its charismatic candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. Early official results gave the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 38% of the vote and a seven-point lead in a count of a sample of polling stations. Opinion polls had predicted a 10- to 15-point lead for the PRI. "Mexicans have given our party a second chance," Peña Nieto told chanting supporters after President Felipe Calderón phoned to congratulated him. We will honour it with results and with a new form of governing that responds to the demands of Mexico in the 21st century. Reporters inside the PRI's imposing modernist complex in the capital saw few of the so-called party dinosaurs, who still hold sway within the organisation, during a carefully managed victory celebration that featured a stage adorned with seven Mexican flags, confetti, and the rousing strains of the mariachi classic Cielito Lindo. Elated young supporters chanted:"We are the PRI to come." Peña Nieto, the former governor of Mexico's most populous state, the State of Mexico, promised there would be "no return to the past." He vowed to alleviate the poverty affecting around half the population with a "renewed free market with social sensitivity," and countered charges that the PRI is likely to seek deals with the drug cartels. "There will be no pact or truce with organised crime," he pledged. Peña Nieto also reached out to the student movement, which rejected him as a superficial makeover of the old regime constructed by the broadcasting giant Televisa. "I share your desires and I understand your complaints," the candidate said. I also want a new country, a successful country that recognises the potential and the talent of every Mexican. But the students were unconvinced. One group, which calls itself "I Am 132" in reference to an early protest in May, released a video showing several rows of glum-looking young people who said they "energetically reject the imposition of a candidate." The students reiterated allegations that Peña Nieto had benefitted unfairly from favourable coverage in the mass media. They also said the election had been plagued by irregularities and episodes of violence that meant polling day "did not take place in the atmosphere of peace and legality that is necessary to ensure a free and reasoned vote." They said web pages they had set up to collate reports of irregularities were systematically hacked during the day. The 500-odd complaints they did manage to collect included many cases of vote-buying, as well as a few incidents of violence near polling booths. The electoral authorities, backed by most of the media and many observers, described the election as "exemplary," however. Peña Nieto's closest rival, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Party of Democratic Revolution or PRD, told his supporters he would not respond to the results until Wednesday, by which time all the official information from polling stations is due to have been processed. "The last word has not been spoken," López Obrador said, leaving himself room to question the legitimacy of the PRI's apparent victory but holding back from the vehement cries of fraud that accompanied his refusal to accept defeat in the last presidential elections, six years ago. The governing Party of National Action (PAN) candidate, Josefina Vázquez Mota, accepted defeat even before the announcement of the quick count, which gave her just 25.5% of the vote. Vázquez Mota's campaign was hampered by widespread frustration at the drug-war violence that rages in many part of the country and the mediocre economic growth that has accompanied two successive PAN administrations, first under President Vicente Fox and then under Calderón. Germán Martínez, a former PAN party chairman, ended an opinion piece in the daily Reforma entitled A Disaster, with a call on his own party to apologise to voters, "whom we have let down with our errors." A sense that Mexico has lost its way since the PAN took over contributed to support for Peña Nieto among voters such as Cristián Marquez, who said he missed the sense of order the old party of power had once brought to his country. "The change of party in government was not good," he said on Sunday while queuing up to vote in the capital. The PRI has learned from the mistakes it made towards the end [of the regime], and it is still the only party that knows how to govern.