Three years ago the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its seventy-one-year grip on Mexico's presidency. The party was written off as an authoritarian, inward-looking dinosaur, made obsolete by the country's opening to the global economy. Mexico's new president, ex-Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox, was both symbol and substance of this hope for a prosperous, market-based future.

The PRI is back. It won almost twenty more seats in the July 6 election for the 500-member Chamber of Deputies, Mexico's lower house. With 224 members, the PRI will be once again the largest bloc in the Mexican Congress. The leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) gained forty-one seats for a new total of ninety-six. Fox's right-of-center National Action Party (PAN), lost about fifty, and will be down to 153.

The election was all about the economy. During his presidential campaign Fox promised voters that the Mexican economy would grow at the rate of 7 percent a year throughout his six-year term. But since passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico's growth has depended on exporting to a robust US market, which started to slump shortly after he took office. Now, midway through his term, the country's growth has averaged less than 1 percent. Add to the political equation the more than 200,000 jobs that have been lost to lower-wage China, and the fury of small farmers being blown away by the post-NAFTA invasion of their markets by US and Canadian agribusiness, and you are left with a large number of unhappy voters.

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