There's no point in talking about who's going to win the Mexican presidential election on July 1. Enrique Pena Nieto is going to win it. What's more interesting is why he's going to win it.

Pena Nieto, the candidate of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is a charming and extremely good-looking non-entity. He speaks no foreign language, has traveled little abroad, and is so ignorant that, when asked on live television what three books had influenced him most, he struggled to name any books at all. Finally, he came up with two: the Bible, and a Jeffrey Archer pot-boiler.

He has spent his entire life in politics, and his timing was good. In 1990 he began working in various local branches of the PRI, the ruling single party that dominated every aspect of Mexican life, and if democracy had not come to Mexico it would probably have taken him a long time to rise to the top. However, 12 years ago, when he was only 34, the PRI lost power after 70 years in office.