Mexican general election, 2000

Mexican general election, 2000

July 2, 2000

Nominee Vicente Fox Francisco Labastida Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Party PAN PRI PRD Home state Guanajuato Sinaloa Mexico City Popular vote 15,989,636 13,579,718 6,256,780 Percentage 42.52% 36.11% 16.64%

States won by the presidential candidates (blue for Fox, green for Labastida and yellow for Cárdenas)

President before election Ernesto Zedillo PRI Elected President Vicente Fox PAN

A general election was held in Mexico on Sunday, July 2, 2000. Voters went to the polls to elect, on the federal level:

• A new President of the Republic to serve a six-year term, replacing then Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (ineligible for re-election under the 1917 Constitution).
• 500 members (300 by the first-past-the-post system and 200 by proportional representation) to serve for a three-year term in the Chamber of Deputies.
• 128 members (three per state by first-past-the-post and 32 by proportional representation from national party lists) to serve six-year terms in the Senate. In each state, two first-past-the-post seats are allocated to the party with the largest share of the vote, and the remaining seat is given to the first runner-up.

Several local ballots were also held on the same day, most notably:

• The General elections were held in Mexico on 6 July 2000.^[1] The presidential elections were won by Vicente Fox of the Alliance for Change, who received 43.4% of the vote,^[2] 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.^[3] Voter turnout was between 63 and 64% in the elections.^[4]

This a historically significant election that made Fox the first president elected from an opposition party since Francisco I. Madero in 1910 and the first one in 71 years to defeat, with 42 percent of the vote, the then-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party.

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Presidential election

Despite some isolated incidents of irregularities and problems, such as one in the southern state of Campeche which involved the 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.

Results by state

Based on the official results of the Federal Electoral Institute

Congress of the Union

Senate

Chamber of Deputies

References