Morena party wins governors’ races in Puebla, Baja California

Sunday was a good day for the ruling Morena party, winning the governors’ seats in two states previously held by the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

In Baja California, which has been governed by PAN for 30 years, Morena candidate Jaime Bonilla Valdez won 50% of the votes, according to preliminary results, crushing PAN candidate Óscar Vega Marín, who came in second place with 23%.

In Puebla, preliminary results indicate that Morena’s Miguel Barbosa won 43% of the votes to become the state’s next governor, beating out PAN’s Enrique Cárdenas, who won 34%.

In a press conference on Monday, Cárdenas conceded the election to Barbosa while criticizing irregularities in the electoral process and lamenting the low turnout, which he said was around 33%.

Barbosa had run for governor of Puebla in 2018, narrowly losing to PAN’s Marta Erika Alonso in a highly contested election that was plagued by irregularities. However, Alonso was killed in a helicopter crash less than two weeks after taking office, triggering Sunday’s special election.

Morena also took control of 11 of the 15 municipalities in Quintana Roo, while PAN won the most municipal governments in Tamaulipas, Aguascalientes and Durango.

Electoral crimes prosecutor José Agustín Ortiz Pinchetti said his office received 68 reports of electoral crimes over the course of the election, all but three of which proved to be false.

In a press conference Sunday night, Ortiz said that people who make false reports of electoral crimes should be punished.

“I think it’s important that the election law be changed to create serious punishments for this kind of manipulation, because it wastes an enormous amount of our time, energy and resources,” he said.

Ortiz said that overall, he considers Sunday’s elections to have been a success because there were no arrests and no violence.

“And that’s no small feat, because elections in Mexico used to be stained with blood,” he said.

Source: El Universal (sp), La Jornada (sp), El Financiero (sp)