Mexico: Political Parties & Elections

Mexico’s modern party system took shape after the 1929 founding of what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed the country without interruption for more than seven decades in a system the writer Mario Vargas Llosa called “the perfect dictatorship.” The PRI dominated the presidency, Congress, and most state governorships through a combination of patronage, corporatist labor and peasant organizations, and, at times, electoral fraud, leaving opposition parties such as the conservative National Action Party (PAN), founded in 1939, with only limited representation for most of the twentieth century.

Electoral reforms during the 1990s created an independent electoral authority and stronger safeguards against fraud, opening the way for genuine multiparty competition. The PAN’s Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, ending the PRI’s 71-year hold on the office, and the PAN retained power under Felipe Calderon in 2006 before the PRI returned under Enrique Pena Nieto in 2012. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), founded in 1989, also emerged as a major force during this period, rounding out a three-party system of PRI, PAN, and PRD.

That arrangement was upended by the rise of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), founded in 2011 by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who won the presidency decisively in 2018 on promises of anti-corruption reform and poverty relief. MORENA consolidated its dominance in 2024, when Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico’s first woman president with roughly 61 percent of the vote, while the MORENA-led coalition also won a supermajority in the Chamber of Deputies. The PRI and PAN, once bitter rivals, have since allied with the PRD in an effort to counter MORENA’s continued dominance of national and state politics.