Enrique Pena Nieto won Mexico’s presidential election July 1, returning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power after 12 years in opposition. He pledged to focus on energy, labor and tax reforms and said he hopes to strike deals with opponents to help shepherd changes through Congress before he takes office in December.

THE winner of Mexico’s presidential election July 1, Enrique Pena Nieto is the triumphant new face of the PRI, which governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years until it was defeated in 2000, succumbing to a buildup of popular resentment and disdain.

Weak economic growth and scenes of sickening brutality in a drug war that has killed over 55,000 people since 2007 eroded support for the conservative National Action Party (PAN), and allowed the centrist PRI back into contention.

In the past, the ambitious and handsome Pena Nieto was trapped in provincial obscurity, seeking a way onto the national stage. When he found it, he breathed new life into his party, stirring hopes of a comeback.

Blessed with an easygoing charm and good memory for faces, the fan of British singer Adele and Irish band U2 made a name for himself as governor of Mexico’s most populous state, avidly courting the media and cutting deals with political adversaries.

A stickler for order, Pena Nieto is held up by supporters as a man who can be relied on in a country steeped in cynicism.

“In the Mexico we want, there is no room for corruption, for cover-ups and least of all for impunity,” he told a recent meeting of party leaders. “It’s time to break with the past.”

However, the victory margin was smaller than expected and results suggested the PRI and its Green allies would struggle to win a majority, officials at the electoral authorities said. Pena Nieto won with about 38 percent of the vote, about 6 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival.

That would leave Pena Nieto reliant on other parties to back his plans to reinvigorate Latin America’s No. 2 economy.

Speaking to reporters in Mexico City, the 45-year-old said he was ready to consult with outgoing President Felipe Calderon and bring in experts to make progress on the reforms and help ease them through Congress, which reconvenes in September.

“This is the great challenge we have ahead,” Pena Nieto said Monday, while announcing he was putting experts to work on his reform proposals immediately. “I aspire to carry out a democratic presidency that governs for all Mexicans.”

His main reform proposals include allowing more private investment in Mexico’s state-run oil industry, overhauling the tax system to improve government revenues and liberalizing the country’s labor laws to encourage job creation.

Pena Nieto has pledged to restore order by beefing up law enforcement, and to raise economic growth to 6 percent a year.

His growth agenda hinges chiefly on three economic reforms: liberalizing Mexico’s antiquated labor laws, extending the tax base to improve government revenues and allowing more private investment into struggling state oil giant Pemex.

The party has been close to backing the first two in the past, but ultimately blocked them to deny rivals a victory.

Opening up Pemex, which the PRI created in 1938, will be more of a departure, and officials say in private the plans could hit resistance among the PRI’s rank and file.

But close advisers to Pena Nieto like Ildefonso Guajardo, an economics expert in Congress, said the party would line up behind the president, who will take office Dec. 1.

“The PRI without the president and the PRI with the president are two different things,” he said. “It gives the party a lot of discipline, especially when it comes to moving forward with the things that Mexico needs.”

U.S. 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.”

Mexico is the United States’ second-largest trading partner after Canada, and bilateral trade is worth about US$1 billion a day. For companies doing business on the U.S.-Mexico border, security is a key issue, and there is concern about Pena Nieto’s shift in strategy for tackling the cartels.

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 win by Pena Nieto with a campaign pledge to reduce drug-cartel violence is stirring an outpouring of responses ranging from anger to cautious optimism.

In the six years since President Calderon sent troops to smash the powerful cartels, more than 55,000 people have been shot, beheaded or tortured to death in Mexico, the majority in rugged states close to the border.

Pena Nieto has pledged to take a different approach in tackling one of the bloodiest crime waves in history, prioritizing violence reduction over battling the cartels.

He wants the federal police bulked up to more than 50,000 officers. He said he would keep the army on the streets until the new police force could take over.

Others in the Texas border city are hoping that Pena Nieto will break with the PRI’s past and help consolidate tentative security gains in hot spots like Ciudad Juarez, where murders averaged 300 a month in 2010 but dropped to around 70 in June this year.

“Yesterday Nieto pledged that there was going to be no pact with the cartels. That is extremely encouraging news,” El Paso mayor John Cook said.

Unlike many recent Mexican presidents, Pena Nieto, who has a law degree from Universidad Panamericana and an MBA from the Monterrey Technological Institute, did not study at an American university.

But he was among a group of several Mexican boys who attended a year of junior high school in 1979 to learn English at Denis Hall School, in Alfred, Maine.

Pena Nieto still speaks some English, but generally sticks to Spanish.

More recently, he has made frequent trips to a luxury apartment in Miami, which the newspaper Reforma has said is owned by his wife, Angelica Rivera, a soap opera star on the country’s biggest TV network, Televisa.

While he was governor of Mexico State, his marriage to Rivera in November 2010 was like a royal wedding. His first wife, Monica Pretelini Saenz, died in 2007 after a seizure. He has four children, including one from outside his marriages.

Pena Nieto, who turns 46 this month, was born in Atlacomulco, a small city about 55 miles (88.5 km) northwest of Mexico City.

He was the eldest of four siblings in a middle-class family; his father, Gilberto Enrique Pena del Mazo, was an engineer for an electric company and his mother, Maria del Socorro Nieto, a schoolteacher.

Pena Nieto’s career took off after his relative Arturo Montiel became governor of the State of Mexico in 1999. Once described as a “bag carrier” for Montiel, by 2003 Pena Nieto was a deputy in the local Congress. Two years later, the telegenic lawyer succeeded Montiel as governor.

However, the notion that Pena Nieto was anyone’s “puppy” is nonsense, said Domitilo Posadas of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who sat in opposition to the PRI in the state’s legislature. The governor, he said, treated the opposition with respect and always kept his word.

“If he wins, the Pena Nieto I’d like to see as president is the one we saw in the State of Mexico: open to dialogue, tolerant and taking on board proposals that didn’t come from him,” he said in a recent interview.(SD-Agencies)