Mexican President Meets with Enrique Pena Nieto EFE
go to original July 18, 2012

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon (R) and the virtual winner of the presidential elections, Enrique Peña Nieto, hold a meeting yesterday, Tuesday July 17, 2012, in his first interview after the elections on July 1, at the official residence of Los Pinos. (EFE/Presidency)

MEXICO CITY - Mexican President Felipe Calderon met with the virtual winner of the July 1 presidential election, Enrique Peña Nieto, for the first time since the balloting.

The president's office said in a communique that Calderon and Peña Nieto discussed a number of subjects of national importance, notably the economy and public safety.

The also agreed that once the TEPJF electoral court declares Peña Nieto the president-elect, they will begin "an orderly process of administrative and political transition."

"President Calderon said that the government of the republic will offer all the support necessary so that the process is carried out in an efficient, transparent way, strictly in accord with the law," the document said.

Peña Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, won the presidential election with 38.21 percent of the vote, while leftist Progressive Movement standard-bearer Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took second place with 31.59 percent, according to the final official results.

Still pending, however, is the decision of the TEPJF, which has until Aug. 31 to review the petition contesting the election results filed by the leftist coalition led by Lopez Obrador.

The election was marred by vote buying and therefore there is no "certainty for any result nor for the electoral process as a whole," Lopez Obrador said in a press conference last Thursday.

The PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000, lost the 2000 and 2006 presidential elections to the conservative National Action Party.

During its 71 years of largely unchallenged hegemony, the PRI relied mainly on patronage and control of organized labor and the mass media, though it was not above resorting to outright vote-rigging and even violence.

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