The centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party was the big winner in Mexico’s mid-term elections held Sunday, as widely forecast. Results show the party, known as the PRI, gained 37% of the vote, while President Calderón’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) garnered 28%. The left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), which enjoyed substantial support in the 2006 presidential elections, is now much weakened, and tallied just 12% of the votes. In addition to doubling its number of seats in Congress, the PRI also won 5 of the 6 gubernatorial races held.
Many commentators previewed the election as a referendum on Felipe Calderón’s presidency. After his election in 2006, his efforts to combat the drug cartels were sure to aid the PAN. “He’s going to get a positive vote, said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, just before the weekend, “The nation feels he is doing a better job than they imagined he would.” Even if Calderón provided a boost, the PAN suffered from being in power at the wrong time—the economy is in freefall and drug violence has left more than 10,000 dead over the past two years.
Conversely, the PRI has benefitted from being out of power. (Interestingly, the one governorship that the PAN won was in Sonora, where the PRI state government was roundly faulted for mishandling the day care center fire that killed 48 children last month.) As the PRD imploded, thanks to party infighting and Andres Manual López Obrador’s histrionics after his narrow loss to Calderón in 2006, the PRI became the only organized alternative to the PAN with a nationwide presence.
The PRI’s resurgence may owe to nostalgia for PRI rule, forgetting the party’s corruption and poor economic track record. Political analyst Victor Hugo Michel states that the electorate simply “doesn’t remember what the PRI was.” The PRI oversaw massacres in 1968 and 1971, cut Mexico off from outside assistance after an earthquake killed at least 5,000 in 1985, and governed over financial collapse in 1982, 1986, 1988, 1994, and 1995.
Drug violence was certainly less prevalent under PRI rule. The PRI institutionalized corruption between drug cartels and government during its seven decades of one-party rule that ended in 2000. As discussed by Shannon O’Neil in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, after 1945 the PRI forged a patron-client relationship with drug cartels, wherein officials and civilians were protected from cartel violence. In return, high-level cartel members were insulated from prosecution. This bargain defined the rules of the game for traffickers and cordoned the violence until the PRI’s hold on power dissipated.
The outcome of Sunday’s election had little to do with any party’s platform. Mexico is not in the throes of an ideological sea change. Mexicans are simply disaffected by rampant corruption, drug-related violence, and a crippled economy. Reviving the PRI may be an act of collective dementia or a willful return to the illusory era of PRI security. Either way, this is unlikely to produce meaningful change in Mexico.
