NAUCALPAN, Mexico - Middle-class voters like Gerardo Olivo helped drive Mexico's ruling party from power 12 years ago, ending its seven decades of rule.
Now the same voters seem ready to bring back the party everyone knows as the PRI.
Olivo, a 33-year-old financial trader, said he voted for the now-governing National Action Party in the past two presidential elections, hoping it would transform Mexico. He's fed up now, though. "My position today is to go back to the PRI" he said. "I already tried the other party because it had promised change, but now I realize there was no change, or the changes were already there."
The PRI - or Institutional Revolutionary Party - held a strong lead in all of final, major pre-election polls on Wednesday, counting on the very thirst for change that led voters to pry it from the presidency in 2000.
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The party had been built to run Mexico from top to bottom under the orders of the president. Unions, farm groups, professional associations were all squeezed in its paternalistic embrace. Until the last few years of its reign, those who challenged it were usually ignored or crushed.
That old PRI system gradually began to crumble as Mexico's urban middle class slowly swelled. Shopkeepers and small business owners, professionals and academics grew weary of the corruption and heavy hand of the old system.
Some turned to National Action, a conservative, religiously inclined party that grew slowly over the years and that frequently joined with leftists to press for reforms. By 1989, those incremental reforms had reached the point that a PRI president, for the first time, allowed an opposition candidate to win a governor's race. Eleven years later, the presidency itself fell to National Action's Vicente Fox.
Analysts say Fox owed much of his victory to middle-class voters, which counterbalanced the PRI's strong hold on poor, rural Mexico. That same bloc swung behind National Action again in 2006 when Felipe CalderĆ³n narrowly edged leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose sometimes fiery rhetoric frightened some and who is running again this year.
Now, though, Mexicans have lived 12 years under National Action, and that party is widely blamed for a sluggish economy and tens of thousands of deaths in a militarized war on drug-trafficking gangs.
"The middle class is the big prize for the candidates," said Oscar de los Reyes, professor at the Monterrey Technological Institute.
A survey released Tuesday by the Consulta Mitofsky polling firm showed middle-class voters swinging to the PRI's Enrique PeƱa Nieto, who was favored by 37 percent of them. Lopez Obrador was backed by 26 percent and National Action's Josefina Vazquez Mota by just 23 percent. The margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.
