Jo Tuckman: Mexican Democracy’s Lost Years

Jo Tuckman is a foreign correspondent who writes for The Guardian and other publications, and the author of “Mexico: Democracy Interrupted.”

IN 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had run Mexico for 71 years with the help of a mixture of authoritarianism, corruption and election-tampering, was voted out of office. This was seen as the end of an era, the relegation of an anachronistic institution to the scrapheap of history.

How is it, then, that the party’s candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, seems poised to win the presidential election next Sunday and become the leader of 113 million Mexicans? In part, it’s a tribute to the party’s survival instincts — and to an image makeover in the form of a young and telegenic candidate with a matinee idol aura, a telenovela actress wife and an immobile hairdo.

But the party, known as PRI, could not have gotten to this position if the rest of the political elite had not made such a mess of opportunities in the last 12 years to make Mexico a more functioning democracy....