The Americas

Mexico enters the era of politics

Will the political class know how to operate the unfamiliar system imposed on it by the voters? It is already learning

|MEXICO CITY

VIVA Mexico!” rose the cry some time after midnight on July 6th from the gathered masses in the zocalo, the broad plaza that for centuries has been the heart of the capital's civic life. This independence-day chant is usually led by the president—for seven decades past, one chosen, for the voters to approve later, by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—as he overlooks his subjects from his imperial balcony; the balcony, that is, of their national palace. Not so this time.

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