Delfina Gómez’s victory over Alejandra del Moral in the June 4 gubernatorial election in the state of México rates as no ordinary triumph. Her victory may well mark a harbinger of things to come in Mexican politics for the foreseeable future.

Gómez, a former schoolteacher with working-class roots running on President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party ticket, soundly beat her opponent, del Moral, who had all three of México’s major opposition parties behind her. Yet Gómez still took 52.6 percent of the vote.

We simply cannot overstate this outcome’s significance. The results could spell the end of the PRI, the once hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party founded in the wake of the Mexican Revolution that went on to dominate national politics for over 70 years. The PRI, for most of those years, governed the entire country and all 32 Mexican states with an iron fist. It will now govern only two states.

The state of México — the jurisdiction that surrounds the capital on three sides and includes slums, suburban bedroom communities, and rural communities — has long been the PRI’s most preeminent bastion. The state hosted the Atlacomulco Group, a shadowy organization that served as the braintrust of numerous PRI politicians, including former President Enrique Peña Nieto.

With more voters than any other Mexican state and nearly as many voters as all of Ecuador, the state of México has been where the PRI perfected its political machine. The party manipulated clientelistic networks and vote-buying to keep the state under its control for nearly a century. The PRI has now lost access to state government coffers, to the pesos so often employed to “win” votes.

The PRI defeat also constitutes a major blow to the opposition’s strategy for the 2024 presidential election. Under the tutelage of business magnate Claudio X. González, a vociferous opponent of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the opposition’s three major parties have come together to present a single candidate in most electoral contests since López Obrador’s landslide victory in 2018. Despite their ideological differences and historical rivalries, these three parties — the PRI, the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — intend to present a single candidate in the 2024 presidential race. But the gubernatorial election results in the state of México show that their chances of winning the presidency, even if they stay united behind one candidate, remain a long shot.

That presidential race now begins in earnest. What lies ahead? Morena seems increasingly likely to have another six years to carry out its transformational agenda.

José Luis Granados Ceja, a Mexican freelance journalist, is currently studying human rights and popular democracy at the Autonomous
University of Mexico City. You can follow his comments on democratic struggles in Latin America on Twitter via @GranadosCeja.