Towards the 2012 presidential elections

Abstract

A few months before the end of President Felipe Calderón's six-year term in office in Mexico, the Mexican political world is immersed in the preparation of the 2012 presidential elections. If we were to look at the electoral results of the 2009 mid-term elections, the 15 state-level processes in 2010 and the results of the 2011 elections, the trends would clearly indicate how the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is retaking its hegemony and announcing an early return to executive power. The 2012 competition, however, will have its own unprecedented particularities and its results will depend on other complex factors not yet clearly determined. In this article we offer several considerations to help us analyze this political process, which could herald a new direction for the country or the deepening of the same model.