MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s outgoing president, Felipe Calderón, was never much loved. His election in 2006 was overshadowed by claims of fraud by a leftist challenger. He then struggled with a deep recession brought on by the global financial crisis. And throughout his term he sponsored an army-led “war on drugs,” which has left a death toll variously estimated at between 65,000 and 100,000. Little wonder that most Mexicans are eager to see him leave office on Saturday.

But there also isn’t much enthusiasm about what comes next. The incoming president, Enrique Peña Nieto, a former state governor with a pretty-boy image, represents a restoration of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled the country between 1929 and 2000 through a mixture of repression, corruption, co-option and vote-fixing. The novelty is that Peña Nieto was fairly elected, albeit with only 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

The reality is that Mexicans voted less for the PRI candidate than against those of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or P.R.D., and of Calderón’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN. A good many people on the left and right fear that the PRI’s authoritarian instincts will soon resurface. Peña Nieto, 46, insists that his party has embraced the new rules of the game.

He has a few things going for him. The country’s economy is again growing, with the combination of falling unemployment at home and fewer jobs in the United States bringing a dramatic drop in illegal migration to the north. And thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, instead of exporting people, Mexico is now a major exporter of cars, televisions, aircraft parts and other manufactured goods.