The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) followed the overturn of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship and ended with a new Mexican government being established within the legal framework of the Constitution of 1917.[2] The regime that followed can be considered a semi-authoritarian political model (or hybrid regime).[3] In 1920, a successful general in the revolution named Alvaro Obregón overthrew the temporary government of the revolutionary leader Venustiano Carranza, which resulted in his election as the president of Mexico.[4] He was then replaced by Plutarco Elías Calles, who ruled Mexico from 1924 to 1928.[5] After a change in the rules that prevented two mandates by the same person, Obregón came back to power in 1928, but was assassinated shortly after.[6] As a result, out-going president Calles founded a political party, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), to solve the immediate political crisis of the assassination and to create a long term framework for political stability, especially the transition of presidential regimes.[7] The period from 1920–1934 in Mexico was marked by a strong presence of military in government and a failure to implement revolutionary reforms.[8]
Under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), the party underwent a transformation to the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, which was organized on a corporate basis, with peasants, labor, the popular sector, and the military each having a sector, with power centralized.[9] The PRM aimed to mediate conflicts between competing sectors within the party, becoming an extension of the Mexican state.[10] In 1946, the party was transformed into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the army was no longer a sector.[11][12] During this time, the government nationalized key industries, such as oil, and implemented land reforms that redistributed property to peasants.[13][14]
Throughout the second decade of the twentieth century Mexico experienced political tension and rising economic instability.[8] The late 1960s and early 1970s saw multiple protests from students and left-wing groups against PRI's authoritarian rule, to which the government responded with a crackdown that culminated in the infamous Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, in which hundreds of protesters were killed.[15] However, the year 1982 gave way to market restructuring policies and gradual political reforms that prompted the democratic transition of Mexico (1982–2012).[16] The first efforts to introduce free and fair elections came with president Miguel de la Madrid in 1983, but the attempt was unsuccessful as he was opposed by politicians in his own party.[16]
In 1988, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a Harvard-trained economist, was chosen as the PRI presidential candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI and ran as a coalition candidate.[17] The 1988 elections were regarded as "the most fraudulent in Mexico's history.[18] In 1989 the leftists who had bolted the PRI formed the Party of the Democratic Revolution.[19] In the wake of the fraudulent 1988 elections, the administration of elections was taken out of the hands of the Mexican government's Ministry of the Interior (Gobernación) and the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE) was created in 1990, with the aim of ensuring free and fair elections and creating public confidence in the process.[20] Besides greater political representation, Carlos Salinas's mandate (1988–1994) also saw economic improvements due to liberalization policies, facilitating the process of democratization.[16]
Logo of the National Revolutionary Party, 1929–1938
Allegory of the Constitution of 1857, by Petronilo Monroy, 1869.
Constitutionally, political parties in Mexico must promote the participation of the people in the democratic life of the country, contribute to the representation of the nation and citizens, and be the access through which citizens can participate in public office, through whatever programs, principles and ideals they postulate.[21] All political parties must be registered with the National Electoral Institute (Spanish: Instituto Nacional Electoral, INE), the institution in charge of organizing and overseeing the federal electoral processes, and must obtain at least 2% of votes in the federal elections to keep their registry. Registered political parties receive public funding for their operation and can also obtain private funding within the limits prescribed by the law. As of 2024, the following political parties are registered with the INE and all have representatives at the Congress of the Union:
The Labor Party (Partido del Trabajo, PT), founded in 1990;
The Green Ecological Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México, PVEM), founded in 1986, but lost its registration for two consecutive elections; it has retained its registration since 1993;
Political parties are allowed to form alliances or coalitions to nominate candidates for any particular election. The coalition must identify itself with a particular name and logo. Proportional representation (plurinominal) seats are assigned to the coalition based on the percentage of votes obtained in the elections, and then the coalition reassigns them to the constituent political parties. Once each party in the coalition has been assigned plurinominal seats, they do not necessarily continue to work as a coalition in government.
Throughout the 20th century, the PRI had an almost hegemonic power at the state and federal levels, which slowly began to recede in the late 1980s.[22] Even though since the 1940s, PAN had won a couple of seats in the Congress, and in 1947 the first presidential municipality (in Quiroga, Michoacán),[23] it wasn't until 1989, that the first non-PRI state governor was elected (in Baja California). It was in 1997, that PRI lost its absolute majority at the Congress of the Union. In 2000 the first non-PRI president since 1929 was elected in what was regarded as the cleanest Mexican election since the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920.[24]
Founded in 1929 as the Partido Nacional Revolucionario ("National Revolutionary Party"), the PRI dominated Mexican politics for over 70 years, bringing to power 11 different governments.
The PAN, founded in 1939, did not win its first governorship until 1989; its candidates won the presidency in 2000 and 2006.
The beginnings of the PRD go back to 1988 when dissident members of the PRI decided to challenge the leadership and nominated Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas for president of Mexico. Cárdenas lost in a highly contested election, but a new political party was born and the party emerged as a third force in Mexican politics, even though they never captured the presidency.
Election package received by Mexicans living abroad.
Suffrage is universal, free, secret and direct for all Mexican citizens 18 and older, and is compulsory (but not enforced).[25] The identity document in Mexico serves also as the voting card, so all citizens are automatically registered for all elections; that is, no pre-registration is necessary for every election. All elections are direct; that is, no electoral college is constituted for any of the elections at the federal, state or municipal level. Only when an incumbent president is absolutely absent (either through resignation, impeachment or death), the Congress of the Union constitutes itself acts as an electoral college to elect an interim president by absolute majority.
Presidential elections are scheduled every six years, except in the exceptional case of absolute absence of the president. However, the term of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will be only 5 years, 10 months (December 1, 2018 — September 30, 2024) due to a Constitutional change.[26] Legislative elections are scheduled every six years for the Senate, to be fully renewed in elections held concurrently with the presidential elections; and every three years for the Chamber of Deputies. Elections have traditionally been held on the first Sunday of July, but the new law means they will be held on the first Sunday in June instead.[26] State governors are also elected every six years, except in Baja California, where the governor is elected for a two-year term.[27] The state legislatures are renewed every three years. State elections need not be concurrent with federal elections. Federal elections are organized and supervised by the autonomous public Federal Electoral Institute, whereas state and municipal elections are organized and supervised by electoral institutes constituted by each state of the federation. Elections within Mexico City are also organized by a local electoral institute.
A strongly ingrained concept in Mexican political life is "no reelection." The theory was implemented after Porfirio Díaz managed to monopolize the presidency for over 25 years. Presently, Mexican presidents are limited to a single six-year term, and no one who has held the office even on a caretaker basis is allowed to hold the office again. Deputies and senators were not allowed to immediately succeed themselves until 2018; both may now serve a maximum of 12 consecutive years.
Federal presidential elections were held on July 2, 2006, concurrent with the full renovation of both chambers of the Congress of the Union. In these elections the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Labour Party (PT) and Convergence (CV) formed a coalition called Coalition for the Good of All. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the Ecologist Green Party (PVEM) formed a coalition called Alliance for Mexico. The Federal Electoral Tribunal declared Felipe Calderón the winner of the elections on September 5, and president-elect. He took office on December 1, 2006, and his term ended on November 30, 2012. The concurrent congressional elections were not contested by any party. Both chambers were completely renewed and no party obtained an absolute majority. This election has been noted by scholars, including Mexican sociologist Jacqueline Peschard, for the "breakdown in consensus that nearly resulted" as a result of the ensuing indeterminacy and the problems that has posed for Mexican democracy.[28]
In 2018 Mexico elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President.[30] He ran under a three-party coalition led by the leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party he founded in 2014.[31]
The elections in each state are done at different times, depending on the state, and are not necessarily held at the same time as the federal elections. As of 2024[32]
The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was followed by the Great Depression, which led to a severely fragmented society and very weak institutions.[33] In 1929, all factions and generals of the Mexican Revolution were united into a single party, the National Revolutionary Party (NRP), with the aim of stabilizing the country and ending internal conflicts. During the following administrations, since 1928, many of the revolutionary ideals were put into effect, among them the free distribution of land to peasants and farmers, the nationalization of the oil companies, the birth and rapid growth of the Social Security Institute as well as that of Labor Unions, and the protection of national industries.
President Lázaro Cárdenas was fundamental to recover some of the social control that was lost during the Revolution and the following economic meltdown in the United States. However, Cárdenas was followed by a series of less-talented leaders that were unable to continue this path and establish an effective rule of law on Mexican society. Moreover, Cárdenas presidency happened before the UN focused on states as the rule in the 1940s and 1950s.[33]
The NRP was later renamed the Mexican Revolution Party and finally the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The social institutions created by the party itself provided it with the necessary strength to stay in power. In time, the system gradually became, as some political scientists have labeled it, an "electoral authoritarianism",[34] in that the party resorted to any means necessary, except that of the dissolution of the constitutional and electoral system itself, to remain in power. In fact, Mexico was considered a bastion of continued constitutional government in times where coup d'états and military dictatorships were the norm in Latin America, in that the institutions were renovated electorally, even if only in appearance and with little participation of the opposition parties at the local level.
Mexico's President Vicente Fox (2000–2006) speaks before the Mexican people.
The lack of the establishment of a true democracy in Mexico can be partially explained many factors, like the ones described above. However, one of them could also be the oil reserves that exist in the country and that were nationalized by the Cárdenas government. Several empirical studies point to a correlation between the existence of natural resources and the difficulty of turning into a democracy.[35]
The first cracks in the system, even though they were merely symbolic, were the 1970s reforms to the electoral system and the composition of the Congress of the Union which for the first time incorporated proportional representation seats allowing opposition parties to obtain seats, though limited in number, in the Chamber of Deputies. As minority parties became involved in the system, they gradually demanded more changes, and a full democratic representation. Even though in the 1960s, a couple (of more than two thousand) municipalities were governed by opposition parties, the first state government to be won by an opposition party was Baja California, in 1989.
Anniversary of the Birth of the President Benito Juarez in the Alameda Central, 2013.
The presidential elections held in 1988 marked a watershed in Mexican politics, as they were the first serious threat to the party in power by an opposition candidate: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who was nominated by a broad coalition of leftist parties. He officially received 31.1 percent of the vote, against 50.4 percent for Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the PRI candidate, and 17 percent for Manuel Clouthier of the National Action Party (PAN). It was believed by some that Cardenas had won the election, but that the then government-controlled electoral commission had altered the results after the infamous "the system crashed" (se cayó el sistema, as it was reported). In the concurrent elections, the PRI came within 11 seats of losing the majority of Chamber of Deputies, and opposition parties captured 4 of the 64 Senate seats—the first time that the PRI had failed to hold every seat in the Senate. Capitalizing on the popularity of President Salinas, however, the PRI rebounded in the mid-term congressional elections of 1991, winning 320 seats.
AMLO meeting with University students in Tlatelolco Square.
Subsequent changes included the creation of the Federal Electoral Institute in the 1990s and the inclusion of proportional representation and first minority seats in the Senate. The presidential election of 1994 was judged to be the first relatively free election in modern Mexican history. Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI won with 50.2 percent of the vote, against 26.7 percent for Diego Fernández de Cevallos of PAN and 17.1 percent for Cardenas, who this time represented the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Although the opposition campaign was hurt by the desire of the Mexican electorate for stability, following the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio (the intended PRI candidate) and the recent outbreak of hostilities in the state of Chiapas, Zedillo's share of the vote was the lowest official percentage for any PRI presidential candidate up to that time.
Claudia Sheinbaum during her victory speech on June 2, 2024. President-elect of Mexico, the first woman to be elected to the position.
Numerous electoral reforms implemented after 1989 aided in the opening of the Mexican political system, and opposition parties made historic gains in elections at all levels. Many of the current electoral concerns have shifted from outright fraud to campaign fairness issues. During 1995–96 the political parties negotiated constitutional amendments to address these issues. Implementing legislation included major points of consensus that had been worked out with the opposition parties. The thrust of the new laws has public financing predominate over private contributions to political parties, tighter procedures for auditing the political parties, and strengthening the authority and independence of electoral institutions. The court system also was given greatly expanded authority to hear civil rights cases on electoral matters brought by individuals or groups. In short, the extensive reform efforts have "leveled the playing field" for the parties.
The 2006 elections saw the PRI fall to third place behind both the PAN and the PRD. Roberto Madrazo, the presidential candidate, polled only 22.3 percent of the vote, and the party ended up with only 121 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, a loss of more than half of what the party had obtained in 2003, and 38 seats in the Senate, a loss of 22 seats. Felipe Calderón, a conservative former energy minister, won a narrow victory, and he was elected as the new president. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, lost the very tight race, did not accept the result.[37]
On December 1, 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador sworn in as Mexico's first leftist president in seven decades, after winning a landslide victory in July 2018 elections.[38] In June 2021 midterm elections, López Obrador's left-leaning Morena’s coalition lost seats in the lower house of Congress. However, his ruling coalition maintained a simple majority, but López Obrador failed to secure the two-thirds congressional supermajority. The main opposition was a coalition of Mexico's three traditional parties: the center-right Revolutionary Institutional Party, right-wing National Action Party and leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution.[39]
↑ Duncan, Raymond. "The Mexican Constitution OF 1917 compared with the Constitution of 1857" in American Academy of Political and Social Science. Philadelphia: 1917, p. 8–122.
↑ Ai Camp, Roderic. "Democratizing Mexican Politics, 1982–2012" in Oxford Research Encyclopedia. Claremont: 2015, p. 1.
1 2 Raby, David. "Mexican Political and Social Development since 1920" in Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Toronto: 1976, p. 27.
↑ Peschard-Sverdrup, Armand; Rioff, Sara (April 20, 2005). Mexican Governance: From Single-party Rule to Divided Government (1ed.). Center for Strategic & International Studies. ISBN978-0892064571.
↑ Duncan, Raymond. "Mexico's Democratic Transition: The Search for New Reform Coalitions" in Law and Business Reviews of the Americas. Mexico: 2003, p. 283.
↑ Adrian Joaquin Miranda Camarena (November 5, 2013). "El Sufragio en Mexico: Su obligatorierdad"[Cumpulsory Voting in Mexico](PDF). Biblioteca Jurídica Virtual del Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas de la UNAM (in Spanish). Retrieved July 19, 2019.
↑ Peschard, Jacqueline; Selee, Andrew (May 1, 2010). Mexico's Democratic Challenges: Politics, Government, and Society (1ed.). Stanford University Press. ISBN9780804771610.
1 2 S., Migdal, Joel (1988). Strong societies and weak states: state-society relations and state capabilities in the third world. Princeton University press. ISBN9780691010731. OCLC876100982.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
↑ Using the phrase of Schedler A (2004) From Electoral Authoritarianism to Democratic Consolidation" in Mexico's Democracy at Work, Crandall R, Paz G, Roett R (editors), Lyenne Reinner Publisher, Colorado USA
↑ Beatriz., Magaloni (2008). Voting for autocracy: hegemonic party survival and its demise in Mexico. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0521736596. OCLC772633021.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party is a political party in Mexico that was founded in 1929 as the National Revolutionary Party, then as the Party of the Mexican Revolution and finally as the PRI beginning in 1946. The party held uninterrupted power in the country and controlled the presidency twice: the first one was for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, the second was for six years, from 2012 to 2018.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano is a Mexican politician and civil engineer. A prominent social-democrat and the son of 51st president of Mexico Lázaro Cárdenas, he is a former Head of Government of Mexico City and a founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He ran for the presidency of Mexico three times, and his loss in the 1988 Mexican general election to Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari had long been considered the result of electoral fraud perpetrated by the ruling PRI, later acknowledged by Miguel de la Madrid, the incumbent president at the time of the election. He previously served as a Senator, having been elected in 1976 to represent the state of Michoacán and also as the Governor of Michoacán from 1980 to 1986.
The Party of the Democratic Revolution is a state-level social democratic political party in Mexico. The PRD originated from the Democratic Current, a political faction formed in 1986 from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRD was formed after the contested general election in 1988, which the PRD's immediate predecessor, the National Democratic Front, believed was rigged by the PRI. This sparked a movement away from the PRI's authoritarian rule.
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Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega was a Mexican politician. He was one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and served as Ambassador to Cuba from January 2022 until his death.
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General elections were held in Mexico on 1 July 2018. Voters elected a new President of Mexico to serve a six-year term, 128 members of the Senate for a period of six years and 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies for a period of three years. It was one of the largest election days in Mexican history, with most of the nation's states holding state and local elections on the same day, including nine governorships, with over 3,400 positions subject to elections at all levels of government. It was the most violent campaign Mexico has experienced in recent history, with 130 political figures killed since September 2017.
Adán Augusto López Hernández is a Mexican politician, lawyer and notary public who served as governor of Tabasco from January 2019 until August 2021, date on which he was appointed Secretary of the Interior by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Hernández is a founding member of the political party MORENA and has formerly held office as senator and congressman in the Tabasco State Congress (2007-2009), the LXI Legislature of the Federal Chamber of Deputies (2009-2012) and the Senate in its LXIV Legislature (2012-2018).
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Mexicoportal 
