By 1981 the officials that were perceived by the public opinion as having the most possibilities of being chosen by López Portillo to succeed him in the presidency were Jorge Díaz Serrano (Director General of PEMEX), Miguel de la Madrid (Secretary of Programming and the Budget, and who had known López Portillo since the 1950s when the latter was one of his teachers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)[7]) and Javier García Paniagua (National President of the PRI).

The PRI then announced—relatively ahead of time[note 2]—on 25 September the chosen person to succeed López Portillo as President of the Republic: Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado.

[13] As De la Madrid himself would later recount, García Paniagua's reaction at not having been the chosen one was particularly aggressive, and so he was replaced in the Presidency of the PRI by Pedro Ojeda Paullada [es] a couple of weeks after the announcement.

In contrast, the announcement of De la Madrid's candidacy was well received by the banking community and the private sector, which was reflected by a 10-point increase in the Mexican Stock Exchange the day of his nomination.

[15] In spite of the initial hostility by many sectors inside the PRI, in the end De la Madrid manage to consolidate his position and to gather the support of his party, agglutinating the so-called "cargada priísta" around himself.

At the time of De la Madrid's nomination in September 1981, the public finances of the nation had already begun to experience the first ravages as a consequence of the fall in oil prices in June.

[22] In March, as a concession to the PRI candidate, López Portillo made some changes in his cabinet and appointed Jesús Silva-Herzog Flores and Miguel Mancera Aguayo (both close to De la Madrid) as Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the Bank of Mexico, respectively.

In a speech delivered by the candidate on 24 May 1982 at León, Guanajuato, De la Madrid advocated a profound program that included fighting inflation and currency volatility, he committed to avoiding a recession and protecting employment, and he finally expressed his rejection of "populism and any form of demagogy".

[23] Many commenters pointed out that De la Madrid himself, as Secretary of Programming and the Budget and as the author of the "Global Development Plan" in 1980 – which had not anticipated a fall in the oil prices and whose mechanisms turned out to be insufficient to deal with the subsequent disaster – was to some extent responsible for the economic crisis.

[27][28] In spite of the worsening economic crisis and the corruption scandals of the López Portillo administration, the PRI held a lead in opinion polls and, as it had always happened since it took power in 1929, its candidate was the eventual winner of the election by a large margin, as the opposition remained divided and none of its candidates had enough political strength to effectively challenge De la Madrid and the massive political apparatus of the PRI.

De la Madrid's aforementioned proposal of "Moral renovation of the society" was also credited as a reason for his decisive victory, as voters hoped that the austere, reserved candidate would indeed make a serious effort to finally curb corruption in Mexico.

In addition, De la Madrid was able to distance himself from López Portillo and to project himself as a serious, hard-working technocrat who was the "perfect antidote" for the social and economic disaster left by his predecessor.

[31] The discredit of López Portillo near the end of his presidency, amid the severe economic crisis and the monumental corruption scandals which involved members of his government and his family, had no precedent in the recent memory of the nation.

[33] The relationship between the two became more distant in the following months, as De la Madrid perceived that López Portillo, through his son José Ramón, was trying to exercise too much power for an outgoing President and that he was trying to overshadow the President-elect.