Mexico City ? With virtually all polls showing that soap opera star-looking candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, 45, is likely to win the July 1 elections, the big question is whether his victory would mean a return to Mexico’s corruption-ridden, authoritarian ways of the past. Although times have changed, that may very well happen.

Peña Nieto’s candidacy for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — the party that ruled this country for seven decades until it was voted out of office in a 2000 election that was heralded as Latin America’s equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall — is leading by about 15 percentage points over its closest rival in most polls.

According to the latest Mitofsky poll released last week, Peña Nieto has 44.4 percent of voter support, followed by leftist candidate Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador with 28.7 percent, and center-right candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota with 24.6 percent. The poll doesn’t count non-responses.

Granted, there could be last-minute surprises. A growing everybody-against-Peña Nieto student movement known as “Yo soy 132” has emerged in recent weeks, accusing Mexico’s two major television networks of promoting Peña Nieto’s candidacy. The student protest movement has spread like wildfire in social media, and has helped Lopez Obrador climb in the polls.

But while there are 14 million Mexicans under 23 who will be eligible to vote for the first time in a presidential election, and many of them may back Lopez Obrador, most political insiders doubt that the student movement will have any major impact on election day because about 75 percent of Mexico’s youth don’t vote.

Lopez Obrador has gone out of his way to distance himself from Chavez, and — despite campaigning on the same vague anti-corruption theme that helped Chavez win his first election — has repeatedly assured Mexicans that he would not lead a revolution that would polarize society, scare away investments, and trigger capital flight.

But unlike President Ollanta Humala of Perú, a former anti-establishment leftist candidate who won the 2011 election thanks to the crucial support of Peru’s Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Mexico’s Lopez Obrador doesn’t have a similar public figure to help him alleviate voters’ anxieties. Lopez Obrador badly needs his Vargas Llosa, but barring big surprises — such as if Mexico’s billionaire Carlos Slim, the richest man on earth, were to give him his seal of approval — he won’t get one in time to win the election.

Peña Nieto aides reject the notion that his government would be authoritarian, because much of the presidency’s powers have shifted to the states in recent years, and because they say he is by nature a consensus-seeking politician.

Peña Nieto says that his top priorities would be to carry out long-delayed health care, labor, tax and energy reforms, including a greater opening of the state-owned Pemex oil monopoly to the private sector, as well as to reduce the drug-related violence that has left about 50,000 dead over the past five years.

He says that he would double the size of Mexico’s Federal Police’s elite units and — without abandoning the war on drugs — focus on homicides, kidnappings and human trafficking.

Peña Nieto’s aides hope that, if wins by a landslide, his job would be made much easier because he would be the first Mexican president in more than a decade to enjoy a majority in Congress.

But critics point out that a PRI government would not pass any significant reforms, because it would not risk its alliances with the country’s biggest and best-organized labor unions. What’s worst, old habits never die, and that PRI would not be able to shed its penchant for corruption, critics say.

For nearly a century, the PRI has been the champion of “crony capitalism” — its sweet deals with friendly business barons were the source of most of today’s biggest Mexican fortunes — vote-buying, electoral fraud, and a combination of bribery and intimidation schemes to control the media, they say.

My opinion: While the election will be much closer than the polls suggest, Peña Nieto is likely to win. His PRI party is the best organized, he has poured many times more money than his rivals into television ads, and many Mexicans seem willing to live with tolerable levels of corruption in exchange for less violence and the promise of greater prosperity.

It’s a dangerous bargain, because in the long run corruption breeds instability and paves the way for messianic leaders. But elections are not about the long run.

A Peña Nieto victory would probably not turn Mexico into the “perfect dictatorship” that it was during much of the 20th century, but it could turn it into a more imperfect democracy than it has been over the past decade.