Mexican president faces uphill battle

MEXICO CITY – The apparent victor of Mexico’s presidential race, Enrique Pena Nieto, struggled Monday with his party’s notorious past, the limitation of his election mandate and an opponent who refused to concede.

His long-ruling and now-returned Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, won only about 38 percent of the vote and is unlikely to get a majority in Congress. In fact, it may lose seats.

He faces an old guard in the PRI that still exercises considerable power, a war with fierce drug cartels and a still sluggish economy. His closest rival, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who polled a higher-than-expected vote of about 32 percent, refused to accept the loss, and many of his militant followers were suspicious of the results.

President Barack Obama called Pena Nieto on Monday to congratulate him. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City said Obama told him the United States “looks forward to advancing common goals, including promoting democracy, economic prosperity, and security in the region and around the globe, in the coming years.”

Pena Nieto’s account of the talk suggested his party has left behind the touchy nationalism of the past. He expressed interest in cooperation in security, commerce and infrastructure, but didn’t bring up the traditional Mexican issue of U.S. immigration reform to help the 12 million Mexicans who live in the United States.

Pena Nieto said he wanted “a relationship that will allow the productive integration of North America.”

The PRI returns to power in unknown political terrain, where Mexico is more divided, more violent and less tightly controlled, raising the potential for political disputes. The battle against drug cartels has already cost more than 47,500 lives and may have contributed to the decline of President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party, whose candidate dropped to third place with about 25 percent of the preliminary vote count.

Pena Nieto pledged to continue that anti-drug offensive, but “with a new strategy to reduce violence and protect, above all, the lives of Mexicans.”

Lopez Obrador refused to concede.

“We can’t accept a fraudulent result,” he told supporters Monday, a reference to his allegations that Pena Nieto exceeded campaign spending limits, bought votes in some states and benefited from favorable coverage in Mexico’s semi-monopolized TV industry.

Lopez Obrador said he will likely challenge Sunday’s vote results, but didn’t say if he would try to repeat nearly two months of street blockades in Mexico City that he led in 2006 to protest a narrow loss to Calderon that he attributed to fraud.