Mexico's Pena Nieto winning election: exit polls

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Opposition candidate Enrique Pena Nieto is seen winning Mexico's presidential election by a comfortable margin and restoring to power the party that ruled for much of the 20th century, according to three exit polls.

Pena Nieto, 45, led by between 8 and 11 percentage points in exit polls released by three of Mexico's main television networks after voting ended on Sunday night.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for 71 years until losing in 2000, has staged a comeback behind the handsome Pena Nieto, who has pledged to open state-owned oil monopoly Pemex to foreign investors, raise tax revenue and liberalize the labour market.

The polls showed him winning around 40 percent of the vote.

Leftist rival Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was in second place with Josefina Vazquez Mota of the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, trailing in third.

Vazquez Mota's campaign was dragged down by a brutal war with drug cartels and the government's patchy economic record.

Preliminary official results were due in the next few hours.

By the time it lost to the PAN in 2000, the PRI had a reputation for widespread corruption, electoral fraud and authoritarianism.

It was in disarray by 2006, when its presidential candidate came in a distant third, but it has rebounded since then and Pena Nieto gave it a new face.

He is promising to restore security to cities and towns ravaged by the drug war and also plans to reform Pemex, a proposal once considered political suicide.

Mexicans are fiercely protective of Pemex, but the PRI, which nationalized oil production in 1938, could be the one party able to liberalize the energy industry.

The PRI laid the foundations of the modern state with a nimble blend of politics and patronage that allowed it to appeal to labour unions and captains of industry at the same time.

Mexicans eventually tired of heavy-handedness that stifled dissent, rewarded loyalists and allowed widespread corruption.

(Editing by Dave Graham and Kieran Murray)