At the start of the decade, the party moved to the centre-right and later right pursuing policies such as privatizing state-run companies, establishing closer relations with the Catholic Church, and embracing free-market capitalism.

However, dissatisfaction with corruption in Peña Nieto's administration, the escalation of the Mexican drug war, and rising crime led to PRI going on to lose the 2018 and 2024 presidential elections with the worst performances in the party's history.

The destape (the unveiling), that is, the announcement of the president's choice, would occur at the PRI's National Assembly (which would typically take place in November of the year prior to the elections), with losing pre-candidates learning only then themselves.

The 1988 presidential election which followed is widely considered to have been fraudulent,[35] and was confirmed as such by former president Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado and in an analysis by the American Political Science Review.

To achieve a complete sweep of elections – the carro completo ("full car") – the party used the campaign mechanism of the acarreo ("hauling"), the practice of trucking PRI-supporters to rallies to cheer the candidate and to polling places to cast votes – in exchange for gifts of some kind.

The creation of the party in the wake of the assassination of revolutionary general, former president, and in 1928 president-elect Alvaro Obregón had laid bare the problem of presidential succession with no institutional structures.

A grave political crisis caused by the July 1928 assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón led to the founding on 4 March 1929 of the National Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido Nacional Revolucionario, PNR) by Plutarco Elías Calles, Mexico's president from 1924 to 1928.

At the time, the strongest labor organization was the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) controlled by Luis N. Morones, the political wing of which was the Laborist Party.

Cárdenas became perhaps Mexico's most popular 20th-century president, most renowned for the 1938 expropriating the oil interests of the United States and European petroleum companies in the run-up to World War II.

[53] The party incorporated the majority of Mexicans through their mass organizations, but absent from the structure for ideological reasons were two important groups, private business interests and adherents of the Catholic Church.

The most powerful labor union prior to the formation of the party was the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), headed by Luis N. Morones, an ally of Obregón and Calles.

In the 1940 election, Ávila Camacho's main rival was former revolutionary general Juan Andreu Almazán, with PRM victory coming via fraud after a violent campaign period.

Starting with the Alemán administration (1946–1952) until 1970, Mexico embarked on a sustained period of economic growth, dubbed the Mexican Miracle, fueled by import substitution and low inflation.

Economic nationalist and protectionist policies implemented in the 1930s effectively closed off Mexico to foreign trade and speculation, so that the economy was fueled primarily by state investment and businesses were heavily reliant on government contracts.

This period of commercial growth created a significant urban middle class of white-collar bureaucrats and office workers, and allowed high-ranking PRI officials to graft large personal fortunes through their control over state-funded programs.

State monopoly over key industries like electricity and telecommunication allowed a small clique of businessmen to dominate their sectors of the economy by supplying government-owned companies with goods and commodities.

Regional underdevelopment, technological shortages, lack of foreign competition, and uneven distribution of wealth led to chronic underproduction of investment and capital goods, putting the long-term future of Mexican industry in doubt.

[91] Echeverría designated José López Portillo, his Secretary of Finance, as his successor for the term 1976–82, hoping that the new administration would have a tighter control on inflation and to preserve political unity.

[93] Social programs were also created through the Alliance for Production, Global Development Plan, el COPLAMAR, Mexican Nourishing System, to attain independence on food, to reform public administration.

He designated Miguel de la Madrid as the PRI candidate, the first of a series of economists to rule the country, a technocrat who turned his back on populist policies to implement neoliberal reforms, causing the number of state-owned industries to decline from 1155 to a mere 412.

[101] In 1997, general Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, who had been appointed by president Ernesto Zedillo as head of the Instituto Nacional de Combate a las Drogas, was arrested after it was discovered that he had been collaborating with the Juárez Cartel.

When the evidence against him became strong enough to warrant an arrest, he disappeared from the public eye two days before the end of his term, being absent at the ceremony at which he was to hand the office over to his elected successor, Joaquín Hendricks Díaz.

Many prominent members of the PAN (Manuel Clouthier,[97] Addy Joaquín Coldwell and Demetrio Sodi), most of the PRD (most notably all three Mexico City mayors Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Marcelo Ebrard), the PVEM (Jorge González Torres) and New Alliance (Roberto Campa) were once members of the PRI, including many presidential candidates from the opposition (Clouthier, López Obrador, Cárdenas, González Torres, Campa and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, among many others).

On 6 August 2004, in two closely contested elections in Oaxaca and Tijuana, PRI candidates Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and Jorge Hank Rhon won the races for the governorship and municipal presidency respectively.

[111] The PRI benefited from both the growing unpopularity of Felipe Calderón's administration as president due to the notorious increase in the homicide rate as a result of his war on drugs, as well as internal conflicts in the left-wing Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD) that deteriorated its image.

[112] According to an article published by The Economist on 23 June 2012, part of the reason why Peña Nieto and the PRI were voted back to the presidency after a 12-year struggle lay in the disappointment of PAN rule.

Poverty grew worse, and without a ruling majority in Congress, the PAN presidents were unable to pass structural reforms, leaving monopolies and Mexico's educational system unchanged.

[116] Moreover, some U.S. officials were concerned that Peña Nieto's security strategy meant the return to the old and corrupt practices of the PRI regime, where the government made deals with and overlooked the cartels in exchange for peace.

Bloomberg's article also suggested Meade could also receive unfair help from the over-budget amounts of money spent in publicity by incumbent president Enrique Peña Nieto (who also campaigned with the PRI).

[143] In the 2018 general election, as part of the Todos por México coalition, the PRI suffered a monumental legislative defeat, scoring the lowest number of seats in the party's history.