Mexico election: Lopez Obrador demands vote recount after losing to Peña Nieto

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-wing runner-up in the Mexican presidential election, is demanding a full recount of votes cast in Sunday’s poll, which he claims was “plagued by irregularities,” CNN reported today.

The preliminary count shows Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won the election by about 6.5 percentage points – a narrower margin than polls had predicted throughout the campaign, Reuters said.

The final result will be released Wednesday.

But Lopez Obrador, who lost the 2006 election by a razor-thin margin, has asked the independent Federal Electoral Institute to count all the votes again, the BBC reported.

"We're going to ask them to clean up the election and make it transparent," Lopez Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution told reporters. 

"For the good of democracy and of the country, all the votes must be counted."

The silver-haired presidential hopeful made the same request in 2006 after losing to Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party by 0.56 percentage points. A partial recount confirmed the original result and Lopez Obrador went on to stage massive protests in Mexico City, clogging streets of the capital for weeks.

Lopez Obrador has accused the PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century and became a symbol for corruption and economic mismanagement, of attempting to buy votes in the run-up to Sunday’s election.

The allegations gained some traction today after the Associated Press reported that thousands of shoppers had flocked to shops seeking to redeem pre-paid gift cards they said had been given to them by the PRI.

But in an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, Peña Nieto said he was "committed to democracy" and rejected "the practices of the past."

More from GlobalPost: Mexico 2012 election coverage