Democracy in Mexico

The result was that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) held near-complete control over the electoral mechanism, essentially turning Mexico into a one-party state until 1988, when its left-wing factions broke off.

[2] The PRI returned to power in 2012, after Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency,[3] but was defeated by Andrés Manuel López Obrador's new National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) coalition in 2018.

They could draft laws ordinances and decrees, exercise judicial review, act as the Supreme Court for colony-initiated cases, supervise indigenous people, censor printed reports, oversee the colonial treasury, and organize local government inspections.

With the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms in New Spain, which created 12 intendancies and weakened the power of the viceroy, the ayuntamientos (municipal councils) "became the institution representing the interests of the local and regional oligarchical groups then setting deep roots into their territories".

Unlike elsewhere in Spanish America, in which the ayuntamientos of the viceroyalties created juntas to rule in place of the monarch, the coup prevented Mexico City's municipal council from exercising that function.

It affirmed national sovereignty, separation of powers, freedom of the press, free enterprise, abolished feudalism, and established a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system.

The constitution granted citizenship to indigenous peoples of Spanish America, but limited the vote to men whose ancestry originated in Spain, including American-born Spaniards, known as criollos.

Royal army officer Agustín de Iturbide joined with mixed-race insurgent leader Vicente Guerrero and issued the Plan of Iguala, which called for Mexican independence, recognition of Roman Catholicism as the sole religion, and the abolition of legal racial categories and distinctions between American-born and European-born Spaniards.

Antonio López de Santa Anna, thus, found support from this portion of the army and ex-revolutionary leaders and published the Plan of Casa Mata, which called for a new congress and national representation.

Only one president, General Guadalupe Victoria, remained in office for a full term over the next forty years as liberal and conservative factions fought fiercely for control of the government.

A new committee of leading conservative landowners, clerics, army officers, and lawyers created a new centralist constitution, and, while it did not give the president absolute powers, Santa Anna approved and it was soon ratified.

[32] The removal of Santa Anna created a short period of democracy, truncated by renewed fighting between the liberal and conservative factions, and was then reinstated at the end of the Reform War.

[38] Nonetheless, though he had originally catapulted himself to public favor by advocating against the centralization promoted by Lerdo de Tejada, once in office he successfully passed an amendment which would allow an individual to run for re-election after a lapse.

Díaz also undertook several measures to silence his opposition during this time—he limited freedom of the press, used a reinforced military to put down dissenters and rebellions, and shifted government officials constantly to ensure they did not develop a following that could oppose him.

Madero managed to escape from prison and published the Plan de San Luis Potosí, calling for people to fight to re-instill democratic principles in the nation, thus catalyzing the Mexican Revolution.

After pursuing significant efforts to redistribute land and overseeing the government appropriation of key industries, the Cárdenas administration faced an economic downturn that prompted a rightward shift in public opinion.

Cárdenas, concerned with ensuring a PRI victory and maintaining political stability, did not allow the party to choose the next presidential candidate, opting instead to hand-pick Maneul Ávila Camacho – a right-leaning politician – to run to succeed him.

[51] The success of Cárdenas's legislative and electoral approaches inspired the following presidents – all from the PRI – to continue the strategies of governing by consensus and choosing a successor based on political pragmatism, not ideological purity.

On the eve of the Olympics, 10,000 students, housewives, workers, neighborhood groups, and young professionals gathered to protest, calling for an end to police violence, the overwhelming power of the state, the lack of democracy in the nation, political arrests, and for the accountability of those responsible.

Under López Portillo in 1977, electoral law was reformed, creating a random selection of citizens to serve at polling places and adding representatives from all political parties to the federal election commission.

According to Kevin Middlebrook, the regime-sponsored initiative was a response to the liberal and progressive factions within the PRI had become "increasingly convinced" that the regime was suffering a significant erosion, along with the public's shifting evaluations of government success.

"[64] While the government touted the pro-democratic reforms it achieved after the rebellion, the Zapatista Army encouraged their sympathizers to boycott the elections, believing the process could not be trusted, and thus indirectly contributed to local PRI wins.

According to Krauze, "The 2000 presidential election was Mexico's first truly democratic national contest in a century, and the victory of Vicente Fox...put an end to 71 years of oligarchic rule by the PRI.

[1] Because of Calderón's ineffective policies towards drug cartels, many people hoped that the election of a PRI candidate would reinstate the relative peace that had existed prior to the PAN's rule.

[76] Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador's political successor, won the 2024 presidential election in a landslide and upon taking office in October became the first woman to lead the country in Mexico's history.

In September 2024, with the decisive vote of the Senate, the controversial judicial reform advocated by López Obrador, which allows citizens to elect judges, including those of the supreme court, has been approved.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Norma Lucía Piña Hernández warned that the reform could "generate tension between judges' duty to be independent and impartial and their need to make rulings which are popular in order to attract votes".

The National Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (INAI), created in 2003 to ensure transparency in government spending, has had its funding cut and is at risk of complete elimination.

This has led to a growing influence in the political sphere, which has been criticized by representatives of the various movements in defense of human rights, and which has highlighted the contradiction, above all, with the electoral promise to shed full light on the disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa.

Simpser, professor and chair of the Political Science Department at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, also emphasizes that a failure to detect turnout anomalies does not equate with a lack of wrongdoing because of this misreporting, and warns electoral manipulation likely continues today.