Popular Socialist Party (Mexico)
Mexican political party
The Popular Socialist Party (Spanish: Partido Popular Socialista, PPS) is an unregistered political party in Mexico. It was founded in 1948 as the Popular Party (Partido Popular) by Vicente Lombardo Toledano.
Lombardo Toledano, the initial leader of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), decided to launch a new party in response to the increasingly moderate and corrupt policies of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The Popular Party was supported by the mine, oil and rail workers' unions, but its potential strength in elections was reduced by the strength of the PRI.
The party adopted Marxism-Leninism as its ideological line in 1960.
It was renamed the Popular Socialist Party in 1960, and over time its leadership became less critical of the PRI; indeed, in all presidential elections between 1958 and 1982 the PPS supported the PRI candidates, and therefore it was often criticized as being a "loyal opposition" or part of the status quo. Due to this, it was popularly known by many Mexicans as the Ni, ni, ni party, as in "Ni partido, ni popular, ni socialista" (Neither a party, nor popular, nor socialist).
While allied with the PRI at the federal level, the PPS represented a serious opposition to the PRI at the local level in the state of Nayarit during the 70s; there, the PPS candidate Alejandro Gascón Mercado won the mayoral race in the state capital, Tepic, in 1972. Three years later, the PPS nominated the aforementioned Gascón Mercado as its candidate for the governorship of Nayarit in the 1975 state election. Back then, the PRI still governed all Mexican states and it was considered "unthinkable" that it would relinquish a state governorship to the opposition, but Gascón Mercado's candidacy attracted the support of wide sectors of the Nayarit electorate, to the surprise of the PRI bosses. On election day, 9 November 1975, the army guarded many polling stations under the pretext of "guaranteeing order", and the official results declared the PRI candidate, Rogelio Flores Curiel, as the winner with 69 762 votes against 44 152 votes for Gascón Mercado.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q753446. VIAF identifies the subject as 7706147727714064710009. The Library of Congress control number is n82006800. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1960, 1958 and 1982.
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