The Mexican Voter Transformed: MORENA Success in the Wake of Party System Failure

Over the last two decades Mexican politics have been in constant change and instability after the fall of the PRI. In 2014, MORENA was founded and began to make its presence known with the legislative elections in 2015, winning 35 seats in the legislature. Despite only winning less than 10% of seats in their first national election, MORENA built off these victories to win the national general election and the presidency with former PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). While easy to attribute this historic victory to the global rise of populism, this project argues that the Mexican case is unique in that this victory goes beyond the populist tendencies of the candidate, but rather the success of a new political party. Through running regression tests on data from survey responses conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project and close analysis of the Mexico case, I find that there is support that voters’ lack of confidence in political parties paired with dropping partisanship were significant factors in AMLO’s presidential victory