Mexican general election, 1994

‹ 1988  2000 ›
Mexican general election, 1994
21 August 1994
Nominee		Ernesto Zedillo	Diego Fernández de Cevallos	Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
Party		PRI	PAN	PRD
Home state		DF	DF	Michoacán
States carried		31+DF	0	0
Popular vote		17,181,651	9,146,841	5,852,134
Percentage		48.69%	25.92%	16.59%

The general election was held in Mexico on Sunday, August 21, 1994. Voters went to the polls to elect, on the federal level:

• A new President of the Republic to serve a six-year term, replacing then Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (ineligible for re-election under the 1917 Constitution).
• 500 members (300 by the first-past-the-post system and 200 by proportional representation) to serve for a three-year term in the Chamber of Deputies.
• 128 members (three per state by first-past-the-post and 32 by proportional representation from national party lists) to serve six-year terms in the Senate. In each state, two first-past-the-post seats are allocated to the party with the largest share of the vote, and the remaining seat is given to the first runner-up.

Presidential election

The 1994 election took place in an atmosphere of political instability after the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation on January 1 that year and the murder of the original PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio on March 23 in Tijuana. Although tension did not reach the level it did around the 1988 election, most political analysts agree that voters opted for continuity by returning the PRI to power, fearful the country might otherwise be destabilized.

Election results

The candidates who participated in the presidential election of 1994 and the results which they obtained were as follows:

Results by state

Based on the official results of the Federal Electoral Institute

Congress of the Union

Chamber of Deputies

Senate

The Congress of the Union is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. Consecutive re-election is prohibited. Senators are elected to six-year terms, and deputies serve three-year terms. The Senate's 128 seats are filled by a mixture of direct-election (96) and proportional representation (32). In the Chamber of Deputies, 300 deputies are directly elected to represent single-member districts, and 200 are selected by a modified form of proportional representation from five electoral regions. The 200 proportional representation seats were created to help smaller parties gain access to the Chamber.

Even before the new electoral laws were passed, opposition parties were beginning to secure an increasing voice in Mexico's political system. A substantial number of candidates from opposition parties won election to the Chamber of Deputies and Senate at the 1994 elections.

External links

• The elections: Good and bad news for North American relations by Andrew Reding of the World Policy Institute
• The 1994 Elections in Mexico: Still Neither Fully Free Nor Fair by Andrew Reding of the World Policy Institute

v • d • e Elections in Mexico Presidential elections 1824 · 1828 · 1833 · 1837 · 1838 · 1848 · 1850 · 1853 · 1857 · 1861 · 1867 · 1871 · 1872 · 1876 · 1877 · 1880 · 1884 · 1888 · 1892 · 1896 · 1900 · 1904 · 1910 · 1911 · 1913 · 1914 · 1917 · 1920 · 1924 · 1928 · 1929 · 1934 · 1940 · 1946 · 1952 · 1958 · 1964 · 1970 · 1976 · 1982 · 1988 · 1994 · 2000 · 2006 Parliamentary elections 1824 · 1828 · 1833 · 1837 · 1842 · 1848 · 1850 · 1853 · 1857 · 1861 · 1867 · 1871 · 1872 · 1876 · 1877 · 1880 · 1884 · 1888 · 1892 · 1896 · 1900 · 1904 · 1910 · 1912 · 1917 · 1920 · 1924 · 1928 · 1929 · 1934 · 1940 · 1946 · 1949 · 1952 · 1955 · 1958 · 1961 · 1964 · 1967 · 1970 · 1973 · 1976 · 1979 · 1982 · 1985 · 1988 · 1991 · 1994 · 1997 · 2000 · 2003 · 2006 · 2009