# The PRI Returns to Power in Mexico

It is increasingly clear that Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has scored a decisive victory in elections for the country’s presidency and national legislature. Led by the charismatic forty-five-year-old Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI managed to convince Mexican voters that the party had changed its corrupt, authoritarian ways during its twelve-year exile from the presidency. Not only did Peña Nieto win the presidential race decisively—by nearly eight points over his nearest opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—but the PRI was also poised for a strong showing in the legislature and the capture of state governorships.

The results were a dramatic reversal of political fortunes for the PRI. The party had lost the presidency for the first time in seven decades when the National Action Party’s (PAN) candidate, Vicente Fox, triumphed in 2000. Then the PRI finished a humiliating third in the 2006 elections, not only losing to the Center-Right PAN candidate Felipe Calderón but also badly trailing the PRD’s López Obrador. In the 2012 election, it was PAN’s turn to be humiliated. The party’s presidential candidate, Josefina Vásquez Mota, garnered only a quarter of the votes cast, finishing well out of the running.

Vásquez Mota’s disappointing performance was due less to her deficiencies than to widespread public disillusionment about Calderón’s record in office, especially the fiasco of his militarized war against Mexico’s drug cartels. That conflict has consumed more than fifty thousand lives since December 2006 and has turned portions of Mexico into chaotic combat zones. And despite the military-led offensive, the cartels seem more powerful than ever. At least one motive for the public’s willingness to put the PRI back into power was the hope that the country could return to the more peaceful days seen under that party’s governance.

Peña Nieto successfully portrayed himself as the leader of a “new, improved” PRI—a party now committed to honest and efficient government rather than the corruption and cronyism that had been its trademark for so many decades. He also broke, at least rhetorically, with the PRI’s stifling economic statism. Peña Nieto has even proposed allowing greatly enhanced private investment, including foreign investment, in Mexico’s lumbering government-run petroleum monopoly, Pemex. PRI loyalists would have considered such a proposal heresy just a few years ago.

The greatest uncertainty, however, is how the new president will deal with the epidemic of drug violence plaguing the country. His position on that issue remained somewhat vague during the campaign. All three candidates promised to reduce the violence, and Peña Nieto’s approach emphasized attacking the whole range of crimes that impacted ordinary citizens rather than devoting so much attention and resources to going after the drug kingpins.

But critics wonder just how his promise will translate into actual policies. Washington’s drug warriors have been pleased with Calderón’s hard-line stance, and they worry that his successor will go easy on the cartels. Peña Nieto has tried to sooth such concerns by rejecting suggestions from such prominent figures as former president Fox that Mexico abandon the war on drugs and embrace a policy of legalization.