Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, born in 1934, Mexican politician and a founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PRD is an opposition political party and campaigns against Mexico’s traditional ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Cárdenas was born in Mexico City and named after the last Aztec emperor. His father, General Lázaro Cárdenas, who was widely regarded as a politician and statesman, was Mexico's president from 1934 to 1940. After attending the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas earned a degree in civil engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Villa Obregón. In 1957 he went to Europe to train at the Ministry of Reconstruction in Paris, France, and in 1958 he worked with the Krupp industrial company in Germany. He then returned to Mexico, where he served as the assistant director of Las Truchas steelworks in his family's home state of Michoacán. From 1976 to 1980 he was Michoacán's assistant secretary of forest resources and fauna.

Cárdenas's involvement in politics began in 1951, when as a student he supported the unsuccessful presidential campaign of opposition candidate General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán. In 1959 Cárdenas joined with his father to organize the National Liberation Movement (MNL) to pressure the Mexican government for reforms and to support the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s Cárdenas was an important figure in the PRI. With the party's backing, he was elected senator from Michoacán in 1976 and served as governor of the state from 1980 to 1986. However, during the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, who served from 1982 to 1988, Cárdenas became increasingly dissatisfied with de la Madrid's pro-business and pro-United States orientation and with the undemocratic inner workings of the PRI. In 1986 he joined with Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, another leading reformist within the PRI, to organize an opposition faction, the Democratic Current. After Cárdenas and the other members of the Democratic Current were expelled from the PRI in 1987, Cárdenas formed the National Democratic Front and announced that he would run for president against Carlos Salinas de Gortari, de la Madrid's handpicked successor.

The 1988 presidential election was among the most tumultuous and controversial in Mexican history. Cárdenas proposed a moratorium on repayment of Mexico's huge foreign debt, opposed de la Madrid's policy of selling off state-owned industries, and called for a redistribution of income to raise the standard of living of Mexico's peasants and workers. The final tabulation of the July 6 election, not announced until a week after the balloting, gave Salinas 50.5 percent of the vote, Cárdenas 31 percent, and Manuel Clouthier of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) 17 percent. Followers of both Cárdenas and Clouthier took to the streets to protest the election results, but the Mexican Chamber of Deputies formally certified Salinas as president-elect.

Cárdenas and other leaders of the National Democratic Front then joined with members of the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS) and a number of other small groups to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The PRD made a weak showing in the midterm election of 1991. In the presidential election of 1994, Cárdenas finished third, garnering only 16 percent of the vote, as against 48 percent for the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, and 30 percent for Diego Fernández de Cevallos of the PAN. In the 1997 midterm election the PRD fared better, especially in Mexico City, and Cárdenas was elected mayor of Mexico City. However, he resigned in 1999 to run for president of Mexico. Cárdenas was defeated in the 2000 presidential election, coming in third behind Vicente Fox of the PAN and Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the PRI.