Institutional Revolutionary Party

The Mexican party that ruled from 1929 to 2000, the longest single party regime of the twentieth century outside the communist world.

Overview

The PRI formed in 1929 as the National Revolutionary Party, consolidating the post revolutionary state into corporatist machine politics: labor, peasant, and popular sectors bound to the party. Renamed PRM in 1938 and PRI in 1946, it won every presidential election for seventy one years through patronage, electoral engineering, and at times repression. Presidents picked successors in the dedazo. Economic crises of 1982 and 1994 eroded the myth, and Vicente Fox ended the streak in 2000. The PRI returned to the presidency 2012-2018 under Pena Nieto, then collapsed to third place. It survives as a diminished machine, studied as the textbook hegemonic party state.