MEXICO CITY — The man who narrowly lost Mexico’s last presidential election will try again next year after winning an opinion poll released Tuesday by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
Six thousand voters were polled, half by an agency picked by the winner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and the others by one chosen by his rival, Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.
Ebrard conceded, saying he wanted to put an end to divisions within the party.
“A divided left would only take Mexico to the precipice,” he said.
The party known as the PRD is the first of three major parties to pick a candidate before the campaign officially begins in February.
Lopez Obrador lost to President Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party by half a percentage point in 2006 and he never recognized Calderon’s victory, claiming fraud.
His supporters occupied the Zocalo, the main plaza in Mexico City, and blocked the city’s elegant Reforma Avenue for weeks to demand that Lopez Obrador be awarded the presidency, protests that helped erode support for the party.
Lopez Obrador, 58, is a former mayor of Mexico City.
Former Mexico State Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is leading in all polls ahead of the July presidential vote.
The PRI held power for seven decades until its defeat in 2000, and polls show it making a comeback across the nation, partly due to weariness with 11 years of National Action governments and horror at the estimated 40,000 drug war deaths that have stained the country since Calderon ramped up the fight against cartels by sending troops into Michoacan, his home state.
Democratic Revolution, meanwhile, has been split by feuding and it has lost much of its support even in its strongholds.
Preliminary results show the PRI winning Sunday’s gubernatorial election in the state of Michoacan. The PRD has governed there for 10 years, but it finished third behind National Action.
Recent polls show that the PRI even has a chance to win back the mayorship of Mexico City, where the PRD has governed since 1997.
The majority of Mexican voters are centrists whose biggest concerns according to recent polls are security and the economy. Ebrard, 52, has argued that he appeals to a broader segment of voters outside the party, while Lopez Obrador, who got his start as a political organizer, is more leftist.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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