Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
제도혁명당
Mexican party founded by the victors of the Mexican Revolution in 1929 as the National Revolutionary Party and given its present name in 1946. It held power without interruption for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, governing Mexico as a de facto one-party state for most of the twentieth century. It kept power through the president's choice of his successor, a corporatist structure that bound workers', peasants' and popular sectors to the party, co-option, electoral fraud and political repression. Its line swung left or right with each president, and from the 1980s it turned to neoliberal policies.
In depth
After the assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón in July 1928, the former president Plutarco Elías Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) on 4 March 1929. It was a device to end the armed struggles among revolutionary generals and regional strongmen over the presidential succession and to guarantee the peaceful transfer of power, and the source reports that it has been labelled a "confederation of caciques". In 1938 Lázaro Cárdenas, who that year expropriated the foreign oil companies, reorganised it as the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), structuring workers, peasants, the popular sector and the military into mass organisations, and set it the aim of "a democracy of workers and socialism". With the change of name in 1946 the military sector was dropped, the socialist goal was abandoned and the slogan became "Democracy and justice".
The party was the state system itself, with the president at its apex. Until 2000 every president of Mexico was a member; all members of the Senate belonged to it until 1976 and all state governors until 1989. The dedazo, the incumbent pointing his finger at his successor, chose the presidential candidate, and the so-called charro unions bound to the party turned out the labour vote. The "Mexican Miracle" of import substitution, in which GDP grew sixfold between 1940 and 1970, legitimised its rule, while the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 exposed the violence behind it. In 1990 Mario Vargas Llosa called Mexico under the PRI "the perfect dictatorship".
From the 1970s PRI governments propped up growth with foreign debt. Luis Echeverría's government (1970–1976) increased social spending through external borrowing until the debt reached $25 billion, and in August 1976 let the peso float for the first time. José López Portillo borrowed dollars from foreign banks against the newly discovered oil fields, raising the debt to $59 billion, but when interest rates soared in 1981 and the price of oil fell in 1982 he suspended payments on the external debt and nationalised the banks. From Miguel de la Madrid in 1982 a series of economist "technocrat" presidents carried out neoliberal reforms that cut the number of state-owned enterprises from 1,155 to 412.
In 1986 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and others who opposed cutting social spending to pay the foreign debt were expelled, and the 1988 election was won by Carlos Salinas through fraud, as the then president De la Madrid admitted in 2004. The left that left the party founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989. The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 2000, returned with Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012, and suffered the worst results in its history in 2018 and 2024. It was a full member of the Socialist International from 2003 until its expulsion in 2025, and in 2024 formally renounced neoliberalism and rebranded itself as a "center-left" party.