Preliminary results of Sunday’s election show a progressive fall of the PRI in the electoral preferences of the citizenry and could even prefigure its disappearance in Quintana Roo, according to a historical review of the vote obtained by the oldest party in Mexico. The loss of electoral base also affected – even more – the PRD, which would lose three other state registrations for not having reached the minimum of 3% of the total vote cast.
In the recent elections to renew the governorship of Aguascalientes, Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo and Tamaulipas, the PRI obtained about 822,249 votes, according to data from the Preliminary Electoral Results Programs (PREP). In 2016, in those same states, in the gubernatorial election alone, the PRI had obtained 2,135,000 votes, not counting the additional 67,500 votes that its coalition with the PVEM and the defunct New Alliance (Panal) won together.
Although Sunday’s results have yet to be confirmed through district calculations, the comparison between the trend of the PREP and the results of six years ago points to a loss of practically 61% of the electoral strength that the PRI had in those entities.
In turn, the PRD obtained this Sunday, preliminarily, 128 thousand 688 votes in the elections for governorships, a figure almost six times lower than the votes that the party took six years ago in the same entities, when it captured 752 thousand.
If the trends of the PREP are confirmed, the PRI would lose, for the first time, a state registry: Quintana Roo, where it would reach 2.9% of the vote.
The PRD would only add state defeats. In 2021, it lost registration in 15 entities and, according to preliminary results, this time it could disappear in three other states: Aguascalientes (it obtained 2.3% of the vote), Hidalgo (2.5%) and Quintana Roo (2.9%). In Oaxaca, its existence hangs in the balance, since there it registered a vote of 3.08%.
The loss of dominance of the PRI was evidenced since the 2021 elections, when the renewal of 15 governorships was at stake – in addition to the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies. In those elections, the PRI was defeated in eight of the 12 remaining entities. In 2018, it had already lost Yucatan to the PAN and Jalisco to Movimiento Ciudadano.
Collapse of the century-old party
Founded by Plutarco Elías Calles in 1929 under the name of National Revolutionary Party, the PRI ruled in absolutely all entities over six decades, until the end of the 80s, when the PAN, first, and the PRD, later, began to dispute the hegemony of the single party.
After Sunday’s election, the tricolor lost Hidalgo, one of its original strongholds. Now he has only two governorships left alone — Estado de México and Coahuila — and he will govern Durango and Aguascalientes in coalition with PAN and PRD, which were once his adversaries.
The fall of the PRI is also noticeable when comparing the results of recent federal electoral processes.
In the 2021 elections to elect deputies, the tricolor received 8.7 million votes, 18% of the total vote. In 2018, in the same election for deputies, it had obtained 9.3 million votes, 16.7% (this calculation does not contemplate the votes received in 2018 by its candidates for senators or its presidential standard-bearer, in order to maintain similar criteria of comparison between both elective processes).
The case of the decline of the PRD, a party founded by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1989, is similar. In 2021, it captured 1.7 million votes for federal deputies (3.7% of the vote), while in 2018 the figure had been 2.9 million (5.3%). This means that, in the three-year period, the Aztec sun lost half of its electoral base.
In the federal elections of 2015, also for the election of deputies, the PRI obtained 11.4 million votes alone, plus about 336 thousand won in alliance with the PVEM.
In that election, the PRD had won 4.2 million votes, in addition to another 51,000 won in alliance with the PT.
Another point of comparison is the presidential election. In 2012, the PRI and its alliances gave its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, 18.7 million votes, a figure that fell to 7.5 million in 2018, when José Antonio Meade was nominated.
The PRD fell from 15.5 million votes in 2012 — its candidate was Andrés Manuel López Obrador — to 1.4 million in 2018, when it nominated Ricardo Anaya in alliance with the PAN and MC.
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