(MENAFN- QNA) Mexico's ruling party has lost seats in congress but may gain a majority from its coalition with the small but growing Green Party that was everywhere during the campaign, according to official voting trends released late Sunday by the electoral institute.
Voters also elected Mexico's first independent governor after a reform allowing unaffiliated candidates, a move seen as a jolt to all political parties.
Independent Jaime Rodriguez, known as "El Bronco," had at least a 6-point lead in the race in Nuevo Leon state, according to exit polls conducted by the television network TV Azteca and other media.
The margin of error in the Azteca survey, however, was 3.8 percentage points. The ruling party candidate, Ivonne Alvarez, acknowledged the vote was close.
"Nuevo Leon has shown that through the ballot box, you can change things," Rodriguez said in addressing his supporters, adding that he will wait for the official count to confirm his victory. "We're going to give the parties six years of vacation."
His support harkens back to 2000, when another plainspoken cowboy candidate, Vicente Fox, managed to topple the PRI's 71-year rule and win the presidency for the opposition National Action Party.
The voting, marred by sporadic outbursts of violence, was seen as a litmus test for President Enrique Pena Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party.
The PRI lost seats, according to the official early count. But a surge in Green Party representatives, from 27 in the current congress to as many as 48, could give the PRI-Green coalition 251 of 500 votes, a majority the party has lacked until now.
Protesters burned ballot boxes in several restive states of southern Mexico in an attempt to disrupt elections, but officials said the vote was proceeding satisfactorily despite "isolated incidents."
Thousands of soldiers and federal police guarded polling stations where violence and calls for boycotts threatened to mar elections for 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, nine of 31 governorships and hundreds of mayors and local officials.
The elections drew a turnout of between 47 and 48 percent, the electoral institute said.
Midterm elections usually draw light turnout, but attention was unusually high this time as a loose coalition of radical teachers' unions and activists vowed to block the vote.
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