2000 Mexican general election

General elections were held in Mexico on Sunday, 2 July 2000. Voters went to the polls to elect a new president to serve a single six-year term, replacing President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, who was ineligible for re-election under the 1917 Constitution. The election system ran under plurality voting; 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies (300 by the first-past-the-post system and 200 by proportional representation) for three-year terms and 128 members of the Senate (three per state by first-past-the-post – two first-past-the-post seats are allocated to the party with the largest share of the vote; the remaining seat is given to the first runner-up – and 32 by proportional representation from national party lists) for six-year terms.
The presidential election was won by Vicente Fox of the Alliance for Change, who received 43.4% of the vote, the first time the opposition had won an election since the Mexican Revolution. In the congressional elections the Alliance for Change emerged as the largest faction in the Chamber of Deputies with 224 of the 500 seats, whilst the Institutional Revolutionary Party remained the largest faction in the Senate with 60 of the 128 seats in the Senate. Voter turnout was between 63 and 64% in the elections.
This historically significant election made Fox the first president elected from an opposition party since Francisco I. Madero in 1911, as well as the first in 71 years to defeat, with 43 percent of the vote, the then-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party.
President Ernesto Zedillo sought to break away from the 71-year-old PRI succession ritual, so the PRI conducted an unprecedented internal process to choose its presidential candidate for the 2000 elections. The president declared, "The so-called dedazo is dead"; dedazo being the term used to refer to the president personally choosing his successor, which roughly translates to "handpicking".
Francisco Labastida Ochoa, Humberto Roque Villanueva, Manuel Bartlett and Roberto Madrazo were the pre-candidates. Despite the president's statement, there was still a sense that Labastida was most likely to become the official candidate due to being the closest to President Zedillo.
Madrazo's confrontation with Labastida during the election was notable, as was Madrazo's "challenging" stance toward Zedillo, exemplified by his campaign slogan, Dale un Madrazo al dedazo ("Give a Madrazo to the dedazo", though it could also be translated as "Give a blow to the handpicking").
On 7 November 1999 the primary election was held, and widespread reports of fraudulent tactics were present. Nevertheless, Madrazo accepted the election's outcome and rejoined the Tabasco government following a meeting with Labastida in Los Pinos, where Zedillo intervened to stop Madrazo from breaking with the PRI. On 20 November Labastida was declared the PRI candidate.
The former Guanajuato governor Vicente Fox Quesada was the only person to seek the National Action Party nomination and was ratified by the party. Pedro Cerisola was his general campaign coordinator.
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas declared their interest in being candidates for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a contest that ended with Muñoz Ledo's dismissal from the party. According to Muñoz Ledo it was inevitable that the same person would run for office a third time if there was no "true democratic process" in the PRD. Muñoz Ledo was later confirmed as the candidate for the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution and Cárdenas was designated as the PRD candidate.
On 27 April 2000 PAN candidate Vicente Fox sent a letter containing ten points to the apostolic nuncio Leonardo Sandri and the Conference of the Mexican Episcopate, outlining the measures he pledged to take on behalf of the Catholic Church and other Christian churches should he win the presidency. These included advocating for "respect for the right to life from the moment of conception," granting churches access to the media, granting free admission to public health centers, prisons, orphanages and nursing homes for priests and other ministers of worship, standardizing seminary coursework with public institution coursework, in addition to giving churches a unique tax system and allowing them to deduct taxes "when they contribute to human development."
Fox reaffirmed his strong religious stance and identified himself as a devout Catholic. Even though Fox had finally won the presidency, the promises he made to the churches in that letter were not kept given that the PAN failed to secure an absolute majority in the Congress of the Union.
PRI candidate Francisco Labastida led in nearly all the polls throughout the first months of the campaign, although in the final two months his lead grew smaller; on the other hand, PAN candidate Vicente Fox was at second place in most of the polls, but in May and June his percentage of supporters increased and he led in many of the final polls.
Given that the overwhelming majority of the polls failed to predict Fox's victory and instead had indicated that Labastida would win by comfortable margins, it has been asserted that many of those polled lied about their preferences, fearing that if they stated support for an opposition party, they would be stripped of the government assistance programs they were receiving by the PRI. The Reforma newspaper, which had predicted a Labastida victory in every poll they published during the campaign, attributed their mistake to the so-called "fear factor".
Some isolated incidents of irregularities and problems were reported. For example, one irregularity in the southern state of Campeche involved the European Union electoral observer Rocco Buttiglione and could have created problems for President Ernesto Zedillo had the PRI candidate won. Overall, however, electoral observers identified little evidence that those incidents were centrally coordinated (as opposed to led by local PRI officials), and critics concluded that those irregularities which did occur did not materially alter the outcome of the presidential vote, which had been more definitive than expected.
Civic organizations fielded more than 80,000 trained electoral observers, foreign observers were invited to witness the process, and numerous "quick count" operations and exit polls (not all of them independent) validated the official vote tabulation. The largest exit poll was organized by the U.S. firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, financed by a Dallas-based organization called Democracy Watch with the support of the Vicente Fox campaign, who were concerned about possible election fraud.
Numerous electoral reforms implemented after the widely-derided and fraudulent 1988 election opened up the Mexican political system, and since then opposition parties have made historic gains in elections at all levels. The chief electoral concerns shifted from outright fraud to campaign fairness issues and, between 1995 and 1996, the political parties negotiated constitutional amendments to address these issues. The legislation implemented included major points of consensus that had been worked out with the opposition parties. Under the new laws, public financing predominated over private contributions to political parties, procedures for auditing parties were tightened, and the authority and independence of the electoral institutions were strengthened. The court system was also given greatly expanded authority to hear civil rights cases on electoral matters brought by individuals or groups. In short, the extensive reform efforts of the 1990s "leveled the playing field" for the parties.
On election night, exit polls and preliminary results from the Federal Electoral Institute quickly proclaimed PAN candidate Vicente Fox winner. PRI candidate Francisco Labastida then headed to his party's headquarters to give his concession speech, but just minutes before he was to speak, a message from President Ernesto Zedillo was broadcast on national TV, in which the President himself acknowledged Fox's victory and congratulated him. The fact that the concession first came from the President instead of his party's candidate later caused tensions between Zedillo and Labastida. Fox was sworn-in as president on 1 December, ending 71 years of PRI rule.
23 years later, in 2023, Labastida accused Zedillo of having sabotaged his presidential campaign, stating that Zedillo called three state governors to threaten them and make Labastida's campaign fail, since Zedillo wanted to hand the presidency over to the opposition party PAN in order to go down in history as a democrat who willingly gave up his party's 71-year hold on the presidency.