Mexico's 1997 midterm elections promise to democratize Mexico's autocratic and centralized presidentialist regime and thereby change Mexican politics profoundly. The electoral blow dealt the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) by voters on July 6 brings an elected mayor to the world's largest city, places more non-PRI governors into Mexican state houses assuring that demands for decentralization will intensify, and takes from President Ernesto Zedillo the congressional basis for the six-year dictatorship that the Mexican presidency has been since the 1930s. Surely the struggle for democracy in Mexico is not over, but a critical battle has been won by democrats of all ideological persuasions. Zedillo himself claimed, in an address to the nation made shortly after the preliminary electoral figures appeared on election night, to be pleased by the progress made by his nation, saying that the day had been a “great democratic fiesta” (Zedillo 1997, 7).

Unlike most elections, the critical issues facing Mexican voters in 1997 had little to do with public policy. Although Mexico is a dozen years into a neoliberal economic restructuring program that has had great consequences for the distribution of income, for the number of Mexicans living in poverty, and for the penetration of foreign capital, goods, and services into the Mexican economy (see Otero 1996), neoliberalism was only peripherally an issue in this election. Both major parties of opposition campaigned on the issue of tax relief, specifically promising to lower Mexico's value added tax from 15% to 10% (Mayolo and Luna 1997, A1; Chacón Albarrán 1997).