Mexican general election, 2000

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Mexico

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Mexico held a general election on Sunday, July 2, 2000. At stake were the Presidency of the Republic, all 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies, and all 128 members of the Senate. Several local elections (state governorships, etc.) were also held on the same day.

[edit] Presidential election

Map indicating which candidate won the most votes for President in each state.

The 2 July 2000 elections marked the first time since the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution that the opposition defeated the party in government. Vicente Fox won the election with 43% of the vote, followed by PRI candidate Francisco Labastida with 36%, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution Party) (PRD) with 17%.

Despite some isolated incidents of irregularities and problems, such as one in the southern state of Campeche which involved the European Union electoral observer Rocco Buttiglione and which could have created problems for President Ernesto Zedillo had the PRI candidate won, there was little evidence that those incidents were centrally coordinated (as opposed to led by local PRI officials) and critics concluded that the irregularities that occurred did not alter the outcome of the presidential vote, which was 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 hitherto obscure outfit in Dallas called Democracy Watch (later it emerged that Democracy Watch was essentially set up by Fox campaign insiders to help prevent an expected election fraud).

Numerous electoral reforms implemented since 1989 aided in the opening of the Mexican political system, and since then opposition parties 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.

[edit] Congress of the Union

The Congress of the Union is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. Consecutive re-election is prohibited. Senators are elected to six-year terms, and deputies serve three-year terms. The Senate's 128 seats are filled by a mixture of direct-election (96) and proportional representation (32). In the lower chamber, 300 deputies are directly elected to represent single-member districts, and 200 are selected by a modified form of proportional representation from five electoral regions. The 200 proportional representation seats were created to help smaller parties gain access to the Chamber.

Even before the new electoral laws were passed, opposition parties were beginning to secure an increasing voice in Mexico's political system. A substantial number of candidates from opposition parties had won election to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate in previous elections. After the 2000 election, however, the Congress was more diverse than ever.