IV.

The PRI in the 21st Century

The congressional and presidential elections of 2000 brought a greater decline in the power of the PRI. The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in its history; the presidential winner was Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). Fox ran as a candidate for the Alliance for Change, a coalition between the PAN and Mexico’s small Green Party. In the congress, the PAN replaced the PRI as the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of Mexico’s congress, while the PRI lost its majority in the Senate. In the 2000 elections the PAN also won the governorships of Guanajuato and Morelos.

Despite predictions of a grim future for the PRI, the party has shown an ability to reinvent itself and to use its extensive organization at all levels of government. Another factor that has helped the PRI is the political division among its major opposition parties. Much of the anti-PRI vote is split between the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the conservative PAN. These two groups have been unable to form a working partnership because of their political differences. As a result, the PRI has won some important elections by polling less than 50 percent of the vote.

Even in the face of its defeat in the presidential elections in 2000, the PRI continued to play a pivotal role in national politics. It effectively checked policy initiatives advanced by Fox and his PAN allies in the national legislature. The PRI blocked their efforts in the congress to reform the tax code, the labor code, and national energy policies during the first half of Fox’s mandate. Subsequently, in midterm legislative elections in the summer of 2003, the PRI scored significant gains. In the Chamber of Deputies, it secured the largest number of seats of any party by a wide margin, 224 out of 500, placing it in a dominant position in the chamber. See also Mexico: Government.

Local and state elections across much of Mexico in the late summer of 2004 also testified to the PRI’s ability to remain an important political force. It won tightly contested races for state governorships in its historic strongholds in the south in Oaxaca and Veracruz and scored upset victories in Chihuahua and Nuevo León in northern Mexico where PAN had long held the governor’s office in each state. The PRI also secured upset victories in the mayoral races in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, again both longtime PAN strongholds.

Despite its recent electoral successes, the PRI continues to experience significant discord and controversy in its ranks. Party traditionalists, whose populist power base focused on unions and peasant groups, managed to reassert their control of the party after years in which university-educated “technocrats” dominated the party. In addition, efforts by some PRI politicians to work with Fox and PAN legislators in crafting reform legislation created strong divisions in the PRI organization.