pri

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) is a Mexican political party founded in 1929 that held uninterrupted power in the country for 71 years from 1929 to 2000, first as the National Revolutionary Party (Spanish: Partido Nacional Revolucionario, PNR), then as the Party of the Mexican Revolution (Spanish: Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, PRM) and finally as the PRI beginning in 1946.
The PNR was founded in 1929 by Plutarco Elías Calles, Mexico's paramount leader at the time and self-proclaimed Jefe Máximo (Supreme Chief) of the Mexican Revolution. The party was created with the intent of providing a political space in which all the surviving leaders and combatants of the Mexican Revolution could participate and to solve the severe political crisis caused by the assassination of President-elect Álvaro Obregón in 1928. Although Calles himself fell into political disgrace and was exiled in 1936, the party continued ruling Mexico until 2000, changing names twice until it became the PRI.
The PRI maintained absolute power over the country for most of the twentieth century: besides holding the Presidency of the Republic, until 1976 all members of the Senate belonged to the PRI, while all of the State Governors were also from the PRI until 1989. Throughout the seven decades that the PRI governed Mexico, the party used a combination of corporatism, co-option and (at many times, violent) repression to hold power, while usually resorting to electoral fraud when these measures were not enough. In particular, the presidential elections of 1940, 1952 and 1988 were characterized by massive irregularities and fraudulent practices denounced by both domestic and international observers. While during the early decades of PRI rule Mexico benefited from an economic boom which improved the quality of life of most people and guaranteed political and social stability, issues such as inequality, corruption and the lack of democracy and political freedoms cultivated growing resentment against the PRI, culminating in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in which the Army killed hundreds of unarmed student demonstrators. In addition, a series of economic crises beginning in the 1970s drastically lowered the living standards of the population.
Throughout its nine-decade existence, the party has featured a very wide array of ideologies (the one in use during any given period often determined by the President of the Republic at that time). During the 1980s the party went through reforms that shaped its current incarnation, with policies characterized as centre-right, such as the privatization of state-run companies, closer relations with the Catholic Church, and embracing free-market capitalism. At the same time, the left-wing members of the party abandoned the PRI and founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) in 1989.
In 1990, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa famously described Mexico under the PRI regime as being "the perfect dictatorship", stating: "I don't believe that there has been in Latin America any case of a system of dictatorship which has so efficiently recruited the intellectual milieu, bribing it with great subtlety. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, nor the USSR, nor Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship." The phrase became popular in Mexico and internationally, until the PRI fell from power in 2000.
After losing the Presidency in the 2000 elections, the PRI held most of the state governments and performed strongly at local levels; nonetheless, in the 2006 presidential election the PRI's performance was the worst of its history up to that point, with its candidate Roberto Madrazo finishing in third place having failed to carry a single state. In spite of this defeat, the PRI continued to perform strongly at municipal and state levels. As a result, the PRI won the 2009 legislative election, and in 2012 it regained the Presidency after winning the elections of that year with Enrique Peña Nieto as candidate. However, massive dissatisfaction with Peña Nieto's administration as a result of numerous corruption scandals and the government's inability to curb the crime rate led to the PRI losing the Presidency once more in the 2018 elections (the PRI candidate in these elections was José Antonio Meade), with a performance even worse than that of 2006.

View More On Wikipedia.org