Mexico is a federal republic of 31 states and one federal district, with the states further divided into 2394 municipios (municipalities). A two-chamber federal congress, with a 128-member upper chamber, the Camara de Senadores (Senate), and a 500-member lower chamber, the Camara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), makes the laws. A directly elected president carries out the laws, and an independent judiciary decides disputes according to Napoleonic law. Women gained the vote in 1954, and an Equal Rights Amendment was added to the constitution in 1974. The legislatures and governors of Mexico's states are elected by their citizens, as are the ayuntamientos (town councils), which run the municipios, and their mayors (alcaldes).

Such is the theory. In practice, Mexican political life was dominated for most of the 20th century by one party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PR!, Institutional Revolutionary Party), and its predecessors, with the national president ruling in the tra- dition of strong, centralized leadershipgoing back to Moctezuma. Accusations of fraud, corruption, bribery, intimidation and violence has long accompanied the all-conquering PRl's election tactics and style of governing at every level.

Mexican politics celebrated its equivalent of the dismantling of the Berlin wall in 2000, when Vicente Fox Quesada of the Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN, National Action Party) was elected president; he was the first non-PRI president since the PRI was invented (under a different name, PNR) in 1929. This sea change was the fruit of growing discontent with the PRl's one-party rule since the mid-1980s, fostered by events such as the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, when the authorities left the people to do most of the rescue and clean-up work themselves; unusually obvious fraud at the 1988 presidential elections; particularly sordid behavior among the circle of the president 'elected' then, Carlos Salinas de Gortari; and the economic crash of the mid-1990s.

In a Gorbachev-like attempt to hang on to power by relaxing its grip, the PRI under Salinas allowed the center-right PAN to win the state governorships of Baja California, Chihuahua and Guanajuato (the first occasion the PRI had ever not won a state governor election), and they introduced limited anticorruption measures for the elections for Salinas' successor in 1994. The winner, President Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI, responding to mounting Mexican dissatisfaction and to pressure from other countries that came with NAFTA, turned Mexico towards being a genuine pluralist democracy, despite opposition from the PRI old guard, which benefited from absence of change. Zedillo allowed the newly independent election-organizing body, the Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build an electoral apparatus transparent enough to overcome fraud.

The first elections under this new setup, in 1997, were for all 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and a quarter of the Senate. At the same time a popular election was held for the new Mexico City mayor, after decades of the capital's being run directly by the federal government. The PRI, unprecedentedly, lost overall control of the Chamber of Deputies, and the Mexico City mayoralty went to Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, of the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD, Party of the Democratic Revolution), who had lost the 1988 presidential election to Salinas. The elections were hailed as the freest and fairest in Mexico since 1911.

For 2000 all three main parties broke new ground by using a primary-election system to choose their presidential candidates. This was particularly historic in the case of the PRI, whose candidates had previously been picked by the 'dedazo' (fingering) method in which the outgoing president, who is forbidden by law from serving more than one sexenio (six-year term), chose a candidate to succeed him from within PRI ranks. That candidate had invariably become president.

In the presidential elections in July 2000, Vicente Fox (PAN) won 43% of the votes, Francisco Labastida (PRI) gained 36% and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (PRD) took 16%. Fox took office in December 2000.

However successful Fox's sexenio turns out, his election as president was the biggest event in Mexican politics since the forming of the PRI in the chaotic aftermath of the revolution in the early 20th century. Democratization, meanwhile, continued at other levels of Mexican politics too; by 2002 there were 15 state governorships in non-PRI hands (eight PAN, five PRD and two PAN-PRD alliance).

Defeat did not cause the PRI to split asunder between 'modern' freemarketeers and 'old-guard' statists, as some had predicted, but it did leave it with a serious identity crisis. Without power, its raison-d'etre for
70 years, it also lacked a convenient niche from which to operate as opposition, now that the PRD represented the left of the political spectrum, the PAN the right, and President Fox (never orthodox even within his own party) the social democratic center.

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