Mexico's former first lady Margarita Zavala announced Friday that she is resigning from the conservative National Action Party and left open the possibility of running for the presidency as an independent.
Zavala is the wife of ex-President Felipe Calderon, who governed from 2006 to 2012.
She had announced her intention to run for the presidential nomination of the party, known by its Spanish initials PAN, but found herself in open conflict with party leader Ricardo Anaya, who also wants the nomination, reports AP.
In a video Friday, Zavala accused the party's current leadership of cancelling internal elections and said they had "handed the party's most important decision to others."
That was an apparent reference to last month's announcement of an alliance between the PAN and centre-left Democratic Revolution Party for the July 2018 presidential elections.
"I am resigning from the PAN for the reasons I have enumerated, but also because the law obliges me to do so," said Zavala, "even before we know what the nomination procedure will be for National Action or the so-called alliance.'
"If I did not do this," she said, "I would be prevented from participating in the elections."
The country's electoral agency had announced earlier in the day it was extending the deadline for registering potential independent candidates by a week, because the Sept. 19 earthquake had forced the closure of offices.