Mexican Revolution
The PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party is one of the major lasting legacies of the Mexican Revolution; its first iteration was the Partido Nacional Revolucionario founded in 1929 under Northern revolutionary general and president of Mexico (1924–1928) Plutarco Elías Calles, following the assassination of president-elect (and former president) Álvaro Obregón in 1928. The establishment of the party created an enduring structure that managed not only presidential succession but also groups with competing interests. Initially, Calles remained the power behind the presidency during a period known as the Maximato, but his hand-picked presidential candidate, Lázaro Cárdenas, won a power struggle with Calles, expelling him from the country. Cárdenas reorganized the party that Calles founded, creating formal sectors for interest groups, including one for the Mexican military. The reorganized party was named Party of the Mexican Revolution. In 1946, the party again changed its name to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The party under its various names held the presidency uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000, and again from 2012 to 2018 under President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Institutional Revolutionary Party
Following the serious allegations of electoral fraud, concerning the election of Enrique Peña Nieto's cousin Alfredo del Mazo Maza as governor of the state of Mexico, in December 2017, Mexican newspaper "Regeneración" (which is officially linked to the MORENA party) warned about the possibility of the PRI committing an electoral fraud on the presidential election, citing the controversial law of internal security that the PRI senators approved as the means to diminish the protests towards such electoral fraud. The website Bloomberg also supported that possible outcome, with Tony Payan, director of the Houston's Mexico Center at Rice University's Baker Institute, suggesting that both vote buyout and computer hackings were possible, citing the 1988 previous electoral fraud committed by the PRI. Bloomberg's article also suggested Meade could also receive unfair help from the over-budget amounts of money spent in publicity by incumbent president Enrique Peña Nieto (who also campaigned with the PRI). A December 2017 article of "The New York Times" reported Peña Nieto spending about 2,000 million dollars on publicity during his first 5 years as president, the largest publicity budget ever spent by a Mexican President. Additionally, the article mentioned concerns about 68 percent of news journalists admitting to not believe to have enough freedom of speech. To support the statement, the article mentioned the time award-winning news reporter Carmen Aristegui was controversially fired shortly after revealing the Mexican White House scandals (concerning a conflict of interest regarding a house owned by Enrique Peña Nieto).