Mexico's PRI Leads in Universal Poll Ahead of 2012 Presidential Election

Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, is favored to win the 2012 presidential elections, according to a poll by newspaper El Universal and Berumen y Asociados.

The party, which governed Mexico for seven decades until 2000, was favored by 27 percent of 2,205 people surveyed nationwide between Nov. 18 and 22. President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party, or PAN, has 24 percent support and the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, has 10 percent, according to the poll, whose margin of error is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

Enrique Pena Nieto, governor of the state of Mexico and a PRI member, was backed by 41 percent of those surveyed in a possible race against Calderon’s finance minister, Ernesto Cordero, and PRD’s Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. In that scenario, Cordero had 12 percent support and Lopez Obrador, who ran for the PRD in the 2006 presidential race, had 15 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jens Erik Gould in Mexico City at jgould9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at jgoodman19@bloomberg.net