There are two big elections next week, but you are probably not aware of the one in Mexico on Sunday.
While voters in the states of Coahuila and Nayarit will also elect new governors, all eyes will be on the election in the State of Mexico. For more than 90 years the PRI has ruled in Mexico's most populace state, but that might be coming to an end.

According to polls, the candidate most likely to end the near-century rule is the Morena candidate, who leads with 24.4%.
But the race is close with the PRI candidate just behind with 23.6% followed by PAN with 14.9% and the PRD with 13.6%.

I know what you are thinking: Why should I care about a governor's race in Mexico?
Trust me when I say that you should.

Alfredo del Mazo, the ruling party’s candidate, is the son of one former governor of the state and grandson of another—both from Atlacomulco. Morena’s Delfina Gomez is a former elementary-school teacher and mayor of Texcoco, a couple of hours' drive east.
Markets are paying close attention. Sergio Luna, chief economist at Citigroup Inc.’s Mexican unit, says he’s never fielded so many investor queries about a local vote. Benito Berber, senior economist for Latin America at Nomura, predicts that a Morena victory could push the peso down 6 percent by July, because it would leave Lopez Obrador with a better-than-even chance of taking national power next year.
“If the PRI loses in the state of Mexico, it’ll be practically impossible for it to win the presidency,” said Aldo Munoz, a political scientist at the Mexico State Autonomous University.

That is why this is important. The Mexican presidential election may be a year away, but Morena candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador is not just leading the polls, but is increasing his lead, all thanks to Donald Trump.

According to a May 6 poll by BGC Associates and the daily Excelsior, López Obrador — a former Mexico City mayor — is leading the race with 26 percent of voters saying they would cast ballots for him, followed by center-right candidate Margarita Zavala with 21 percent, and ruling party hopeful Miguel Angel Osorio Chong with 19 percent.
But the most interesting part of the poll is a chart with Mexico’s voting trends over the past 12 months. It shows a steady rise by López Obrador and his Morena party, especially after the U.S. elections last November....
López Obrador told me in an interview several years ago that he had never met with late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez nor with Cuba’s Fidel Castro. But López Obrador sounds exactly like Chávez did when he ran for office. López Obrador lashes out against corruption, vows to reverse what he calls the privatization of Mexico’s oil resources, and wants to revert to Mexico’s old nationalist foreign policy.

A dramatic shift to the left in Mexican politics would have a ripple effect throughout Central America, not to mention at our southern border.

The other BIGGER election is UK's general election.
What once was considered a slam dunk for the Tories has become a nail-biter with a familiar plot.

In the made-for-America production, the ageing leftwinger known simply as Bernie rose from nowhere to electrify the 2016 race for the White House. Yet, despite the lower-budget feel of the British version, this movie is getting a remake. Here, too, a leader who was at first ignored, then ridiculed, and now reviled by the establishment, has seen a last-minute surge in the opinion polls that threatens to upset a complacent opponent...
Sanders, perhaps the only politician in the world to have done this at scale, arrives in Britain on Thursday for sold-out speaking engagements in Brighton, Brixton, Oxford and the Hay-on-Wye festival, a long way from the rustbelt battlegrounds of either country.

What was once the punchline for bland Torie jokes, the idea of Labour winning next week is no longer a laughing matter. In fact, it has become a matter for odds-makers. To be fair, Corbyn still has to win the undecideds by a significant margin.

May was looking at a landslide, and now she risks doing worse than former PM David Cameron, who won in 2015 with a 6.5-point advantage over Labour.

One last thing to keep track of is Italy.
Their election was supposed to be in May 2018, but a surprise political breakthrough means that their next election should be in September instead. The populist Five-Star Movement has a slim lead in the polls.