AKIPRESS.COM - Independent candidate Jaime “El Bronco” Rodriguez bucked eight decades of precedent Sunday to win the governor’s office in Nuevo Leon, one of Mexico’s wealthiest states, in a rebuke of the established political parties.

In national voting, President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party and the allied Green Party will maintain a near majority in Mexico’s lower house, as polls had forecast in recent weeks, according to Mexico’s electoral institute, reports Bloomberg.

Despite protests in southern states from demonstrators over issues ranging from Pena Nieto’s education overhaul to a massacre of 43 students last year, less than one percent of polling stations were unable to open, according to authorities.

Rodriguez, a profanity-prone rancher whose nickname, meaning wild horse, also translates as “The Brazen One,” represents a shift away from the perceived favoritism and corruption of the long-dominant parties. He’s set to become Nuevo Leon’s first governor from outside the PRI and the rival National Action Party, or PAN, in at least 88 years.

“This clearly shows the people’s dissatisfaction with the behavior of political parties,” Gabriel Casillas, the chief economist at Grupo Financiero Banorte SAB, Mexico’s largest publicly-traded bank, said in an interview in Mexico City. “Political parties will have to rethink their strategies. We could see a strong individual, independent candidate run for president in 2018.”