Topic summary
1988 Mexican general election
22.83pp)All 64 seats in the Senate of the Republic
33 seats needed for a majority
All 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies
251 seats needed for a majority
General elections were held in Mexico on 6 July 1988. They were the first competitive presidential elections in Mexico since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) took power in 1929. The elections were widely considered to have been fraudulent, with the PRI resorting to electoral tampering to remain in power.
PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari was proclaimed the winner of the presidential election, with the Secretariat of Interior reporting he received 51% of the vote. It was the lowest for a winning candidate since direct presidential elections were inaugurated in 1917; in all previous presidential elections, the PRI faced no serious opposition and won with well over 70% of the vote. In the Chamber of Deputies election, the PRI won 260 of the 500 seats, as well as winning 60 of the 64 seats in the Senate election.
Although early results from the parallel vote tabulation indicated that Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas was leading, when the official results were published, Salinas de Gortari was claimed to have won by a large margin. All of the opposition candidates decried the rigged elections, and there were numerous rallies across the country, including those by opposition lawmakers in Congress. However, Salinas de Gortari was allowed to take office as President on December 1 after the PRI-dominated Congress ruled his election legitimate.